PAOLO BUGGIANI

Maremma – La Casa in Collina [The House on the Hill] brings the Tuscan hill country into tighter focus than the panoramic works: the horizon is closer, the forms more compressed, the architecture, a grey arch and the angled planes of a hillside building, pressed forward against a warm surround of orange and terracotta. The composition is more frontal than lateral, the hills rising steeply rather than receding, giving the painting an intimacy unusual in this series.

The Maremma’s chromatic character, soil shifting from red-orange oxidized clay to pale grey tufa, finds its direct equivalent in Buggiani’s constructive principle: color as spatial fact, each zone establishing its own weight without the mediation of tonal modeling. The arch at the center, half-architectural, half-chromatic event, does not merely punctuate the composition; it anchors it, allowing the surrounding color fields to press outward with freedom precisely because something holds the center.

The atavistic feeling for spatial order that Giuseppe Marchiori identified in the early work as specifically Tuscan, connecting Buggiani’s sensibility to the controlled compositions of Burri, is fully matured here. The fresco surface lends the palette a matte Mediterranean weight that situates these landscapes firmly within the tradition of Italian wall painting from which the technique itself descends.