PAOLO BUGGIANI

Il Celeste Crudo (del Cielo) [The Raw Blue of the Sky] takes its title from the most striking element: a saturated, vivid blue occupies the upper third of the composition with an almost aggressive chromatic presence, quite unlike the warm grey or dusty blue sky zones of the other landscape works. Below it, horizontal bands of warm brown and white are interrupted by a large black form pressing downward like geological force, calligraphic blue marks running across its surface.

In the context of Buggiani’s fresco landscapes, which typically maintain a Mediterranean clarity and spatial order, this dark intrusion reads as weather or geological time: the slow pressure of the earth’s mass against the luminous certainty of the sky above it. The calligraphic marks within the black zone, quick and liquid, introduce a velocity different from anything else in this body of work, the gestural sign breaking free from the color structure that elsewhere contains it.

The word “crudo” signals not rawness in the pejorative sense but intensity of sensation: a color encountered before habit has softened it. The blue connects this work to the chromatic investigations of Klein, but where Klein’s blue was a metaphysical absolute, Buggiani’s is specific and earthbound, a sky color that is also pressure and weather, rooted in the gestural Informale tradition of the postwar Roman avant-garde.