Abaco

The work constructs an almost entirely ochre visual field in which the image of a young man standing in an urban street emerges like a memory subjected to erasure. Frontal yet unassertive, the figure remains suspended between recognisability and anonymity; buildings, vehicles and peripheral presences lose substance within the dominant colour. The mixed media on paper does not stabilise the scene but heightens its precariousness, making everyday life appear as an image already worn down by its own circulation.

Above, the word “ABACO” interrupts the representational space in irregular white letters with a palpable material presence. Below, a constellation of red and blue circular elements introduces a second register: that of number, calculation and combination. Their arrangement evokes both the beads of a counting frame and the elementary signs of a prize game, without resolving into an unequivocal code. A crucial tension thus arises between word and image: the abacus, a rational instrument of calculation, is brought into contact with the aleatory horizon of winning.

Within Zampogna’s research connected with “Scratch & Win,” this contrast acquires critical force. He relates ordinary experience—a body, a street, an apparently subdued moment—to the mechanisms through which consumer culture translates desire into probability. The promise of sudden economic change is not directly illustrated; instead, it operates as a grammar superimposed on life, composed of implicit numbers, primary colours and possible combinations.

The work’s irony remains restrained and coincides with its most bitter note. The young man does not visibly share in the excitement of the game; instead, he occupies an emptied space, while the small chromatic signs concentrate an artificial vitality at his feet. Lived reality and media reality are no longer clearly opposed: the latter adheres to the former and reorganises it, turning the calculation of fortune into a fragile measure of contemporary identity and aspiration.