Febbre da cavallo

The promise of economic redemption transforms the race, a figure of energy and competition, into a fever administered by the impersonal codes of gambling. In the «Scratch & Win» series, Zampogna does not merely represent gambling, but enlarges its grammar until it becomes a condition of ordinary experience. The horse, elsewhere associated with speed, power and myth, is subjected to the logic of numbers and winning combinations. The words «Febbre da cavallo» work in the same direction: the passion evoked by the title takes the form of a contagion between individual desire and commercial promise, in which the pursuit of luck replaces any genuine possibility of change.

The silhouettes of the horses, interrupted by numbered circular fields and extended into drips, lose their bodily continuity and become combinations to be checked. The movement of the race survives, but it is stiffened into serial repetition and contradicted by the running material, as if the forward impulse produced only an unstable image. Beside them, the frontal figure does not participate in a narrative scene. Her stillness instead exposes her to the grammar of gambling, while the violet tonality unifies body, space and lettering in a surface close to printed reproduction. Individual and promise remain separate, yet this failure to connect reveals how thoroughly the media code has already become their shared environment.

The work thus brings the series’ irony to a graver point. The prize does not appear as an outcome, but as an expectation embedded in images of competition, numbers and the figure’s suspended posture. «Real reality» and «media reality» are no longer divided between subject and ticket. They coincide within the same visual economy, where energy, hope and identity are converted into available signs. What remains is not the excitement of the race, but a condition of dependence on the abstract possibility of a lucky break.