A caval donato non si guarda in.. carta

Within «15 Portrait 15 Poets», Zampogna subjects Elio Pagliarani’s identity to the double regime of the altered proverb and the prize ticket, making personal recognisability coexist with the impersonality of collective language. The poet is not treated as the guarantor of an intact word, but as the place where formulas worn down by common use begin to create friction again. The deviation from the traditional saying interrupts the automatism of memory and continues, in a more intimate register, Zampogna’s investigation of media mythologies: everyday language, too, is a repertoire available for repetition and manipulation.

The phrase «A caval donato non si guarda in.. carta» crosses the face and replaces the proverb’s bodily conclusion with a term that evokes the support of writing. The shift does more than produce absurdity: it moves the portrait from the verification of physiognomy to the materiality of the sign, as if the poet’s identity could be read only through an already printed surface. The screen-printed face, almost erased by white and held within an earth-coloured field, remains recognisable through the glasses and absorbed pose, yet that persistence is fragile. Screen printing’s reproducibility and the painted abrasions turn resemblance into an intermittent apparition. Below, «Non hai vinto», or «You have not won», introduces the impersonal verdict of the scratch card, opposing the logic of an outcome to the gratuity evoked by the gift.

The work thus connects two moments in the artist’s research without collapsing one into the other. From «Scratch & Win» it takes the devalued promise and the automatic verdict; in the poet’s portrait, however, that grammar measures the resistance of an identity entrusted to language. Pagliarani remains present, but does not control the codes that pass across him. The incorrect proverb does not illustrate his poetry, and the verdict does not narrate a personal defeat: together they show how face, shared memory and serial communication can occupy the same surface without settling into a stable meaning.