Pompeii Papyrus is made from handmade paper that has been sculpted, crumpled, and compressed before any pigment touches it: the structure of the work exists before the color arrives. Raw reds pool into the paper's valleys; ash-gray saturates the ridges. What results is less a painting than a terrain, and the terrain is unmistakably volcanic: charred, folded, carbonized, as though the paper itself were the eruption's first casualty and its only witness.
Pompeii Papyrus is made from handmade paper that has been sculpted, crumpled, and compressed before any pigment touches it: the structure of the work exists before the color arrives. Raw reds pool into the paper's valleys; ash-gray saturates the ridges. What results is less a painting than a terrain, and the terrain is unmistakably volcanic: charred, folded, carbonized, as though the paper itself were the eruption's first casualty and its only witness.
The material in Pompeii Papyrus is not representing destruction: it is the outcome of a process of forming that involves tearing, compression, and structural violence. The paper was sculpted before any pigment arrived, the form established before the color, so that what the pigment does is reveal a topography that already existed. This is the Charta logic: paper cast and sculpted as the primary compositional act, pigment following gravity into the formed landscape. This sharpens in relation to Alberto Burri’s work, whose burned plastics and ruptured burlap carry the same ontological conviction that the material itself is the argument. But where Burri's register is forensic and industrial, encountered after catastrophe from the outside, the warmth of handmade paper shaped by hand means the folds here suggest skin as much as geology, flesh as much as ash.
Pompeii Papyrus belongs to the Charta series, works on handmade paper begun in 2009 that form the generative core of Ruggero Vanni's three-dimensional research. In the Charta works, the paper is cast and sculpted before any pigment arrives: structure precedes color, and the topography of the surface is the composition.
