PAOLO BUGGIANI

Ritorno dal Viaggio [Return from the Journey] is built around a single decisive event: a large diagonal stroke in dark brown-black bisects the composition from upper center to lower right, and around it, planes of blue-grey, pale ochre, orange, and dusty pink are laid in with the directness of a painter re-establishing contact with the pictorial field after time away. The title names this experience precisely.

The gestural mark is not wild but purposeful: a structural axis holding the surrounding color zones in equilibrium while asserting the physical act of painting as a value in itself. The fresco grit absorbs the mark differently than in the more carefully worked surfaces, giving the brushstrokes a raw, almost scored edge that would be impossible on a smoother support. The body’s return to a known place and the hand’s return to a known practice are the same event in this painting.

The connection to the Roman Informale is felt most directly here: the tradition of Burri and the postwar Roman avant-garde, in which the physical encounter between material and gesture was the primary pictorial event, runs close to the surface. Naldi’s observation that the gesture in Buggiani’s late paintings is “the manual sign that seems to chase memory” finds its most literal statement in a work whose title is already the act of return.