Omaggio a Bacon 2

Within Butchers, the reference to Francis Bacon stages a disturbing continuity between the human body and animal flesh, yet submits it to a decorative order that makes violence both visible and ordinary. The homage does not consist in a declared quotation from a single painting, at least according to the available sources. Instead, it takes up a central problem in Bacon’s painting: the vulnerability shared by the figure and flesh. Zampogna returns this problem to his own investigation of defused drama, in which the slaughterhouse appears not as a bloody exception, but as an image already available for contemplation and consumption.

The frontal axis shared by the figure and the two carcasses turns anatomical proximity into a kinship that is difficult to evade. Enlarged and arranged in near symmetry, the animal bodies do not illustrate the act of killing. They loom like stage wings or signs, while the human figure occupies the same grey surface and appears subjected to the same exposure. The fabric’s woodland pattern further complicates this equivalence. Trees, snow and repeated small animals receive slaughter within a wholly ornamental nature, where living prey and carcass can coexist without narrative rupture. The few red accents interrupt the monochrome, yet remain incorporated into the regularity of the pattern.

The work thus takes the Butchers series beyond the representation of the relationship between animal and executioner. Individual responsibility recedes, revealing a more impersonal visual mechanism: violence is neutralised precisely because everything, from body to landscape, can become surface. Presented during the 2018 studio programme at MACRO Asilo, the homage also renews the method of appropriation established with Artmedia. Bacon is invoked not as a stylistic model, but as a cultural memory of the vulnerable body. What remains is an unresolved coexistence of trauma and ornament, in which the loss of dramatic intensity becomes the genuinely dramatic fact.