La notte porta.. avviso

In «15 Portrait 15 Poets», Zampogna subjects Nanni Balestrini’s identity to a language already worn down by common use and prize games, turning the poet’s portrait into the place where personal speech and impersonal code cease to coincide. The formula “Night brings counsel” remains recognisable, but the substituted ending disables its automatism. The poet no longer guarantees the integrity of language. He becomes its testing ground, within a practice that extends the contamination between “real reality” and “media reality” through proverbs, verdicts and formulas of fortune.

The deviation from “counsel” to “warning” converts the proverb’s reassuring promise into an ambiguous signal, suspended between communication and admonition. The two dots before the final word make the shift perceptible, as if the statement hesitated before betraying its expected conclusion. The screen printed face preserves Balestrini’s recognisability, but its technical repeatability exposes him to the same impersonality as the common phrase. Ochre acrylic marks cross the image and fracture its coherence, while the chromatic frame tends to treat it as a printed image placed in circulation. Below, “You have not won” counters the possible openness of the “warning” with the scratchcard’s unappealable verdict, returning language and identity to the binary logic of the missed prize.

The work thus introduces into the portrait of a friend a tension already active in the «Scratch & Win» cycle: the promise of transformation is reduced to a formula that assigns or denies value. Here, however, the game concerns more than economic aspiration. It affects language itself, which appears to offer shared wisdom but instead produces hesitation, error and disorientation. Between the poet’s recognisable presence and the anonymity of the codes that cross it, identity remains legible but not sovereign. What remains is language removed from both proverbial wisdom and poetic certainty, now close to the administrative noise of a communication that warns without clarifying.