Grifone 3

Grifone 3 stages the survival of myth as a contaminated image, capable of acquiring ritual authority only by passing through the serial codes of the present. In the Mata & Grifone cycle, begun in 2010, Zampogna does not reconstruct a southern legend as an intact repository of origins. Instead, he subjects it to the same principle of interference that, from the Artmedia experience to the mythologies of advertising, destabilises every distinction between memory, experience and the already coded image. Grifone thus emerges as a presence both ceremonial and artificial: the past does not return in presumed purity, but takes shape within a contemporary surface that displays, repeats and transforms it.

The low viewpoint and upward gaze give the giant a solemn stature, while its rigid frontality distances it from individual physiognomy and brings it closer to the public function of a simulacrum. This authority, however, does not dominate the support. The fabric printed with fish, lettering and grids occupies the ground and reappears through the pale garment, making body and setting coincide within the same regime of repetition. The preprinted motif does not accompany the figure as mere decoration: it passes through its substance and translates myth into a form exposed to commercial seriality. The face, intensified by artificial colours and almost theatrical features, also remains suspended between ritual mask, painted effigy and media apparition.

The work therefore introduces into legend the central problem of Zampogna’s research: no collective image is accessible outside the devices that make it visible. Compared with the earlier contaminations between “real reality” and “media reality”, interference here does not come from a superimposed window, but coincides with the material weave upon which the figure takes shape. The giant retains its symbolic force, yet does so in a precarious condition, sharing the surface with ordinary, repeatable signs. The viewer is not offered a nostalgic return to ritual. What remains instead is the experience of a memory that can survive only by accepting its alteration by the present.