Animali porta fortuna

Within the «Scratch & Win» series, the work turns the promise of a prize into a total environment, where the individual is absorbed by the impersonal grammar of commercial desire. Zampogna does not merely represent a lottery ticket, but enlarges its code until it becomes the space of experience itself. Luck thus ceases to be an exceptional event and becomes an ordinary media mythology, capable of organising expectations, behaviour, and images of the self. The contamination between «real reality» and «media reality» reaches an explicit form here: the person does not observe the promotional device from outside, because she has already entered it as one of its signs.

The disproportion between the small human figure and the enormous lucky animal reverses every plausible hierarchy, giving the advertising mascot a presence more solid than that of the body. Their shared yellow colouring brings the two subjects closer, but does not make them equivalent: the animal retains the assertive clarity of a printed drawing, while the figure appears worn, uncertain, almost held back on the surface. The words «FIND THREE MATCHING SYMBOLS WIN THE PRIZE SHOWN» also act less as information than as a command. The game’s conditional syntax replaces narrative with an automatic procedure, making every possible transformation depend on a prescribed, impersonal combination. Acrylic and screen printing ink sustain this friction between painterly presence and the hardness of the reproduced code.

The work therefore carries the theme of luck beyond irony about gambling. The promised prize offers the «mediocre catharsis» that the archive identifies in the series: an apparently accessible escape, yet one governed by a language that reduces desire to calculation and repetition. Compared with the earlier contaminations by advertising, the media image no longer interrupts reality here, but contains it. What remains for the viewer is a scene in which hope survives only in the form prepared by the product that claims to fulfil it.