“Cirkus” Artmediastudiozeta, Roma

In Rome, at “Artmediastudiozeta”, the exhibition Cirkus is under way, showing Gaetano Zampogna’s recent work. The artist, born in Scido (RC) in 1946 but active in the Capital for 35 years, has worked since 1994 to reclaim a figurative mode of painting permeated by the media mythologies of our time, initially highlighting the weakness of reality perceived as an advertising product. Over the imposing, monochromatic, moonlike images of large anonymous faces, he superimposes the polychromatic, minimal “events of the world” as a disruptive and destabilizing element: media windows taken from the covers of the most important international magazines. 
In the next phase, Zampogna creates an alienated relationship of identity between the two subjects, enlarging the earlier advertising windows until they become equivalent to the portraits, until, that is, “real reality” and “media reality” become interchangeable. 
The result is a painted image “stripped of memory” in which the two “events” engage in dialogue with unsettling naturalness: the strength of the two images lies in their insubstantiality and anonymity, caught in the act of complicity. Through a refined technique, advertising and contemporary life feed off each other. 
The artist’s latest works represent a further, logical step in this ironic and tragic analysis of reality: the figures live bizarrely within the stylized imagery of “Gratta e vinci”.
La Scopa, l’Isola del tesoro, gli Animali portafortuna, Cirkus are icons of a devalued contemporary world that represent, for Western man, the expectation of a mediocre catharsis: the hope of personal wealth, a media chimera as an antidote to the cruel, global emptiness of these days of history.