Mata 2 2010

Mata 2 2010 transforms ritual memory into an unstable presence, in which the solemnity of the southern Italian giant survives only by becoming contaminated with the decorative codes of the present. In the Mata & Grifone series, Zampogna neither reconstructs the legend philologically nor reduces the giantess to a folkloric document. Instead, he brings her into the method that runs through his research, founded on encounters between images belonging to different registers. Myth therefore offers no assured return to origins. It becomes a form that remains active precisely because it accepts artifice, superimposition and displacement.

The enlarged, upward-turned face monumentalises Mata, yet the fixed gaze removes her from individual presence and places her within the suspended state of an effigy. The figure appears at once close and unreachable, invested with an authority that depends on scale but unsettled by its visibly constructed nature. The printed fabric answers this tension: red roses and animal markings do not merely surround the body, since they resurface in the blue mantle and make the boundary between figure and setting permeable. The fabric thus acts as an existing visual repertoire, both domestic and spectacular, from which painting makes the giant emerge without entirely separating her from ornament. Mata oscillates among ritual apparition, theatrical simulacrum and an image made available for consumption.

The work continues Zampogna’s reflection on the interchangeability of “real reality” and “media reality,” but transfers it from the advertising present to a collective memory of southern Italy. Once translated into an image, tradition too remains exposed to the languages that display it and put it into circulation. What survives is therefore not an intact identity, but a figure made contemporary through its own contamination. Mata retains the gravity of ritual while decoration destabilises her authority, leaving the viewer with a presence that is at once archaic and artificial.