Mata 4

Mata 4 stages a ritual memory that cannot return as an intact origin, but acquires presence by becoming contaminated with the decorative imagery of the present. In the Mata & Grifone series, Zampogna does not reconstruct the legend of the southern Italian giants philologically. Instead, he subjects it to the method of interference that runs through his practice: after the appropriations of Artmedia and the exchange between “real reality” and “media reality,” popular myth also reappears only within an already coded image. Mata thus becomes a figure suspended between processional effigy, pictorial character, and a memory of a southern Italian childhood.

The serial motif of lighthouses and sailing boats deprives the giantess of a specific historical setting and turns the sea into a domestic, repeatable scene. The printed fabric does not provide a setting for the story. It opposes ritual singularity with a surface that could continue beyond the edges. Against this impersonal continuity, the rigid frontality of the bust and the oversized crown preserve Mata’s ceremonial authority, while the chromatic heterogeneity exposes her nature as a constructed image. The upward gaze makes no contact with the observer and keeps the figure in a state of apparition. Even the polka dot dress introduces a code foreign to legendary solemnity, making royalty, ornament, and everyday familiarity coexist without reconciling them.

The work marks a decisive shift in Zampogna’s practice of contamination: interference no longer comes only from magazine covers, advertising, or artistic repertoires, but from the support itself, which absorbs the myth into its rhythm. Legend is not opposed to modernity as an authentic refuge. It survives precisely through the distance introduced by decoration, becoming visible as a memory already transformed by the circulation of images. What remains is a presence at once monumental and precarious, capable of evoking ritual without restoring its totality.