Fruit

The work converts the experience of landscape into a promise of winning, showing how the logic of Scratch & Win can colonise even an image of presence and travel. In the Scratch & Win series, Zampogna does not merely represent gambling but extends its grammar into ordinary life: anything can become a sign to combine, an omen of luck, or the anticipation of a reward. The mountain scene retains the appearance of a memory or shared experience, yet it is removed from its own continuity and recoded as a surface of expectation.

The sequence of enlarged, isolated fruit translates natural elements into serial symbols, suspended between nourishment, prize, and commercial code. Their regular arrangement does not deepen the space but crosses it like a game strip; the drips descending from some of the fruit nevertheless fracture their emblematic clarity and reveal a material resistance to the sign’s perfect legibility. At the same time, the dominant pink unifies figures and landscape within an already distant reproduction, while the bright colours of the lettering and fruit impose the artificial regime of promotional graphics upon the scene. The word «FRUIT» no longer names something natural: it classifies it as a visual category, ready to be recognised and consumed.

The work thus completes one of the central shifts in Zampogna’s research, from the opposition between «real reality» and «media reality» to their full interchangeability. The figures are not erased, but their experience becomes inseparable from the device that interprets and devalues it. The economic promise remains implicit and is pervasive for that very reason: no sum needs to appear because the entire landscape has already been transformed into possibility. What remains is nature made available as a combination, seductive and sterile at once, in which desire recognises its own symbols but cannot verify any win.