Non faccio footing…

The work challenges the idea of an autonomous identity by showing how the ordinary person and the advertising body are already organised by the same regime of desire. In the Advertising series, Zampogna does not oppose an authentic face to a false commercial image. Instead, he gives the two registers equal visibility and allows each to expose the construction of the other. The reference to jogging, an activity associated with bodily care and discipline, ironically introduces a distance between declared behaviour and the model being proposed. Advertising is therefore not an external message. It becomes the form through which the subject measures what she is and what she might desire to be.

The vertical division places the monochrome portrait beside the advertising pose without establishing a hierarchy between them, making the two registers mutually interpretable. The green cast removes the face from the naturalness of flesh and brings it closer to the condition of a printed image, while the red of the other half makes the displayed body immediate, artificial and available to the gaze. The cursive writing crosses the posing figure and turns a private phrase into a slogan: the individual voice seems to assert itself, but does so within the visual grammar of branding, exercise and seduction. The coexistence of painterly modulation and screen-printing ink also prevents any clear separation between singular presence and technical reproducibility.

The work clarifies a crucial development in Zampogna’s investigation of “real reality” and “media reality”: contamination occurs not only between different images, but within the subject’s perception of herself. The sentence’s irony does not release the figure from advertising pressure. On the contrary, it shows how thoroughly personal language may already be inhabited by its codes. The resulting identity is divided only in appearance, since portrait, desire and commodity now participate in the same visual circuit.