Chi dorme non piglia.. corde

Within «15 Portrait 15 Poets», the work removes Beppe Sebaste from the celebratory stability of portraiture by turning common language into a device that both identifies and contradicts him. Zampogna takes a recognizable face and exposes it to two impersonal codes, the proverb and the scratchcard verdict. Both promise an immediate answer, one in the form of wisdom, the other as an outcome of chance, yet their authority falters here. Replacing “fish” with “cords” does not complete collective knowledge. It makes that knowledge foreign to itself and opens within the portrait an unstable space between personal identity and received language.

The incongruous ending “cords” crosses the face at eye level and breaks the automatism of reading, preventing the features from being separated from the error that disturbs them. The acid green, thickened around the perimeter and projected in oblique traces across the print, also sets the singularity of gesture against the reproducibility of the screen printed image. The face remains legible, but painting erodes its continuity and holds it between individual apparition and an already circulating surface. Below, the phrase “You have not won” introduces the administrative coldness of the scratchcard. It does not merely comment on a defeat, but subjects proverb and person to the binary logic of a verdict.

The work thus brings into the portraiture of 2009 a tension already central to Zampogna’s research, that between “real reality” and “media reality”, transferring it from the montage of images to the contamination of face, verbal formula and consumer code. The poet friend is not assigned a definitive identity. Instead, he persists in the gap between recognizability and interference, while the failed proverb restores to language a precariousness that ordinary use tends to erase. What remains is not the confirmation of a character, but an identity exposed to collective devices that claim the power to name and assess it.