Omaggio a Bacon

Within Butchers, Omaggio a Bacon turns the continuity between the human body and animal flesh into an image of labor that ornament makes both disturbing and ordinary. The declared reference to Francis Bacon does not require the identification of a specific painting in order to operate. It concerns, above all, the loss of any reassuring hierarchy between the individual, the organism, and exposed flesh. Zampogna nevertheless transfers this problem beyond Bacon’s claustrophobic space and places it within his own reflection on defused drama, where violence does not disappear but becomes compatible with the surface presenting it.

The figure holds two opened carcasses like symmetrical extensions of his own body, making the bearer and what is borne participants in the same carnal vulnerability. The animal forms opening at either side create an almost ceremonial vestment, an ambiguous covering that can clothe the human body while anticipating its possible reduction to matter. Against this grave equivalence, the green and gold fabric distributes animals and vegetal motifs with indifferent regularity. The slaughterhouse thus enters a domestic, decorative visual environment in which repetition lessens the scandal of death. Even the red emerging below does not reconstruct a bloody event, but remains caught within the ornament, as though the trace of blood itself could be converted into pattern.

The work thus clarifies the meaning of Butchers: the drama lies not only in the display of flesh, but in the ease with which that display is absorbed into an agreeable, repeatable, consumable order. Compared with the contamination of “real reality” and “media reality” developed by Zampogna in earlier cycles, here the interference is entrusted to the support itself. The fabric does not comment on the scene from outside, but normalizes it while keeping it visible. What remains for the viewer is an image in which labor, sacrifice, and decoration coincide without achieving reconciliation. Their coexistence becomes a measure of contemporary habituation to violence.