Biography

Gaetano Zampogna

Born in Scido, in the province of Reggio Calabria, in 1946. He lives and works in Rome.

In 1989 he was one of the founders of the Artmedia group. In keeping with the movement’s theoretical principles, based on a conception of art as the “appropriation and sacking” of twentieth-century works, he inserts original works by artists including Schifano, Boetti and Sol LeWitt into monochrome or bichrome surfaces, or photographic supports in cibachrome. After this experience, which ends in 1994, Zampogna turns towards a recovery of figurative painting contaminated by the media-born myths of our time. At first, he brings out the weakness of a reality perceived as a product of advertising: over the monochrome, lunar grandeur of large anonymous faces he superimposes “world events” as media windows taken from the covers of leading international magazines. In the next phase Zampogna creates an alienated relationship of identity between the two subjects, enlarging the earlier windows until they become equivalent to the portraits, rendering “real reality” and “media reality” interchangeable.

The artist’s subsequent works represent a further, logical step towards an ironic and tragic analysis of reality: the figures live strangely within the “figurative forms of Gratta e Vinci” (scratch-cards). L’Isola del Tesoro and Animali Porta Fortuna are icons of a devalued contemporary world, representing the expectation of a mediocre catharsis: the illusory hope of personal wealth. In 2009 the artist makes a series of portraits of poet friends, monochrome and immediately recognisable, lightly “disturbed” across their surfaces by the incorrect wording of familiar proverbs (for example, “can che abbaia...non nuota”).

In 2010 the most recent phase of Zampogna’s work begins; with a visionary impulse he organises large visual machines whose protagonists are two allegorical figures: the giants Mata e Grifone, who come from the distant imagination of southern Italy and who, as if conjured up, appear on vast fabrics decorated with floral motifs, becoming a crystallised staging and a means of escape towards an original rituality set against the emptiness of history, with the dreamlike tangibility of a shadow that takes visible form. The stature of the “Giganti in posa” overturns the certainty of reality, reverses its chronologies, as though to say that only what can be painted is real, and only what does not exist is real.

From 2014, after this fabulous, dreamlike experience, the artist has wanted, in his own way, to reopen his eyes to the world by addressing one of the dramatic subjects of Western art, treated, to name a few, by Rembrandt, the Carracci, Chaïm Soutine, Picasso, Francis Bacon and Damien Hirst: the animal slaughterhouse. In Zampogna’s work the slaughterhouse is an incorporeal staging in which the animal and its executioner coexist harmoniously on damask fabrics, almost becoming part of the decoration themselves: the drama is defused, as though to affirm that the media defusing of drama is the true great drama of the present day.

Then Covid.
An event of apocalyptic, metaphysical scope, let us say: and the contemporary age is definitively dead.

Zampogna is not a painter but a masked and non-existent man among masked, non-existent people: his latest Non Opere reach the apex of the subject’s non-existence and demonstrate the non-existence of reality: reality becomes, then, a metaphor that needs no representation because it is itself its own representation.

We live among ghosts and we are ghosts; we are a dream and a nightmare of our own non-being: in fact the prelates do not exist, the Pope is heading towards Nothingness, family groups are larvae, hands do not clasp, conferences are mute, kisses have no lips, the Queen is a mask with a hat, the dog is lost.

Dinners between presumed lovers have an empty Champagne bucket.

Elmerindo Fiore