Grifone 2

Grifone 2 stages myth not as intact memory, but as a ritual presence that can survive only by becoming contaminated with the visual artifice of the present. In the Mata & Grifone series, begun in 2010, Zampogna retrieves the legendary giants associated with the imagination of southern Italy and removes them from both ethnographic documentation and nostalgia. Grifone is not restored to a stable origin. He becomes a figurative machine in which ritual, recollection and contemporary imagery interpenetrate. In a different form, this revives the principle of contamination that runs throughout the artist’s practice, from Artmedia appropriation to the exchange between “real reality” and “media reality.”

The low viewpoint grants the giant ceremonial authority, but the proximity of the face turns his monumentality into an exposed, almost theatrical presence. His gaze, directed beyond the frame, avoids meeting the viewer and keeps the figure suspended, as though the ritual continued without coinciding with the present. The animal-print fabric scattered with blue roses further unsettles his solidity. Its printed pattern surrounds the body and resurfaces through the less opaque areas of the garment, preventing the painting from fully separating itself from its support. Folklore and serial decoration establish no hierarchy. Instead, they form a single artificial regime in which plume, mantle and ground share the same scenic visibility.

The work thus shifts legend from the territory of origins to that of visibility. The giant retains his symbolic stature, but his identity now depends on the surface that makes him present while absorbing him. Zampogna does not oppose an authentic culture to the imagery of consumption. Rather, he shows that even myth, in order to become visible again, must pass through foreign codes and accept an unstable memory. What remains is a figure at once solemn and vulnerable, whose ritual force coincides with the impossibility of appearing in a pure form.