Grifone 5

Within the Mata & Grifone cycle, the giant survives as a ritual authority only by accepting entry into the serial regime of the contemporary image. Zampogna does not recover Grifone as the intact testimony of a southern past, but reactivates him within a surface already occupied by another mythology, that of illustrated narrative and its reproducibility. Popular ritual and mass culture are therefore not opposed as authenticity and artifice. They share the same space and become two forms through which a community constructs, transmits and consumes its figures.

The repeated pattern of comic panels turns the background into a media flow that deprives the myth of any illusion of an intact origin. Faces, cars and dialogues recur in a regular sequence without forming a legible story, converting narrative into a visual environment. Against this seriality, the low viewpoint, upward gaze and red clothing restore a ceremonial presence to the giant, while also exposing it as a construction. The figure appears to impose itself upon the fabric and at the same time to depend upon it: the painted body interrupts the sequence of images, while the printed surface relocates its authority within the contemporary circulation of signs.

The work thus moves the contamination between “real reality” and “media reality” from the territory of news and advertising into that of ritual memory. Grifone is neither dissolved by the commercial code nor able to dominate it fully. He gains substance precisely through their incongruous coexistence. Compared with Zampogna’s earlier appropriations, the borrowed image does not function only as a superimposed quotation, but as the perceptual fabric within which the legend must find a place. What remains before the viewer is a myth that is still recognisable but lacks any protective distance, compelled to measure its endurance against the repetition, consumption and instability of present images.