Animali porta fortuna

Animali porta fortuna turns the promise of a prize into a device that absorbs ordinary life, showing how the desire for economic redemption is administered by the codes of gambling. In the Scratch & Win series, Zampogna does not merely depict a lottery ticket. He enlarges its grammar until it becomes the condition through which the subject appears and is measured. Price, instructions, numbers and lucky symbols translate the expectation of personal change into a predetermined sequence. Fortune thus assumes the impersonal form of a set of rules, while possible economic catharsis remains subject to the mechanical repetition of another attempt.

The female figure crosses the ticket’s graphic fields and loses autonomy, as if concrete life were already contained within the grammar of winning. Her attenuated substance, seemingly printed rather than fully painted, does not separate her from the yellow ground, but exposes her to the same serial logic that governs words and numbers. Beside her, the enlargement of scratched panels and animals turns the checking of a combination into an unstable visual environment, where prize and erasure coincide. The act that should reveal a value produces abrasions, gaps and fragments that resist reconstruction. Even the animal, removed from the reassuring function of a lucky emblem, becomes the arbitrary container of a probability.

The work brings a central transition in Zampogna’s research to completion: «media reality» no longer overlaps with life as a separate window, but organises its desires, postures and expectations from within. The irony of the cartoon scale does not soften this subordination, since it makes the gap between the visual emphasis of the prize and the modesty of the hope on offer even clearer. Shown in the 2007 Cirkus exhibition in Rome, the work reveals gambling as both spectacle and discipline. The subject seems to occupy the image, but the ticket defines her space and horizon.