La pazienza è la virtù dei.. Fanti

Within «15 Portrait 15 Poets», the portrait of Giovanni Fontana turns patience from a moral virtue into an expectation governed by collective formulas, where identity, proverb and the promise of fortune are exposed to the same instability. Zampogna subjects the recognisability of his poet friend to two languages already worn by use: the popular maxim, which claims to transmit shared knowledge, and the Scratch and Win verdict, which reduces expectation to an impersonal outcome. The work thus continues his inquiry into the contamination of “real reality” and “media reality”, but concentrates it in the relationship between face, common language and the code of reward.

The incongruous ending «Fanti» undermines the authority of the proverb without replacing it with a certain meaning. The sentence remains recognisable in its structure, yet the error releases it from automatism and makes it particular, perhaps even private, without settling its reference. Beneath it, «You have not won» closes every ambiguity with the administrative neutrality of a predetermined sentence: patience brings no reward, only the repetition of waiting. Yellow acrylic invades the field and crosses the screen printed image, opposing the irregularity of gesture to the reproducible fixity of the face. Giovanni Fontana remains identifiable, but his presence is treated as a surface on which foreign codes can settle and compete for interpretation.

The portrait therefore neither celebrates the poet nor dissolves him into anonymity. It places him at the point where individual identity endures while being continually redefined by received expressions and collective promises. Compared with the earlier works connected to Scratch and Win, the mythology of fortune no longer organises a scene from ordinary life, but interferes directly with the face of a friend. Zampogna thus makes portraiture a site of friction between personal memory and impersonal language, leaving the viewer with a recognisability that no longer coincides with stable knowledge of the subject.