Colorama: A Poetic Reclassification of Colors by Cruschiform

The book 'Colorama. Il mio campionario cromatico' by Cruschiform, the French creative studio founded by Marie-Laure Cruschi, offers a poetic alternative to the Pantone color classification system. Published in Italian by L'ippocampo in 2017, the volume presents 133 colors with evocative names like 'Bianco neve' and 'Chiaro di Luna', each occupying two pages: one with an illustration and short text, the other with the color alone. The book includes a thematic index reorganizing colors into categories such as 'Dolci delizie' and 'Vestiti tradizionali'. The article by Marco Enrico Giacomelli, originally published in Grandi Mostre #7 on Artribune, contextualizes the work within the historical debate on color theory, referencing Goethe's 'Theory of Colors' (1810), Newton's 'Opticks' (1704), and Wittgenstein's 'Remarks on Colour' (1950-51). Giacomelli notes that Pantone, founded in 1962 in New Jersey, became the industry standard with 1,144 colors identified by alphanumeric codes, but argues that subjective experience of color persists, as demonstrated by Cruschiform's book.