Critical text
In Marilyn Monroe, the myth of natural strength is made inseparable from the media production of desire, so that horse and celebrity appear as bodies equally available to the gaze. In the Horses series, Zampogna treats the animal not only as an emblem of energy, speed and power, but subjects its image to contamination by an editorial icon already worn down through reproduction. The reference to Marilyn Monroe, introduced through «Playboy», does not add a narrative to the painting. It transfers onto the horse the same visual economy that turns an individual into a public myth and the body into a surface of circulation.
The horse lowers its head and crosses the field in a posture without momentum, converting animal power into an exposed, consumable presence. Its almost white mass emerges from a dark environment, yet abrasions and glazes weaken its substance, as if the painting itself had undergone the wear of a reproduced image. Overlapping the back and rump, the «Playboy» cover interrupts the body’s unity and imposes the frontal code of editorial communication upon the scene. The contrast between the animal’s subdued movement and the pose offered by the cover does not oppose nature and artifice. Instead, it turns them into two forms of the same exposure, in which desire has already been organised by a visual apparatus.
The work thus occupies a decisive point in Zampogna’s practice after Artmedia: appropriation no longer concerns only art history, but extends to the media mythologies that regulate contemporary perception. The animal body’s “real reality” and the celebrity’s “media reality” do not remain separate in scale or function, since the insert physically invades the figure and alters its legibility. What remains is not a comparison between animal innocence and advertising eroticism, but a more unsettling equivalence. Every body, whether natural or celebrated, can be isolated, named and converted into an available image.
