Pet of the year

Within the «Horses» series, the work tests animal power against a media taxonomy of desire, in which different bodies become equivalent because both are subjected to display, possession and consumption. Zampogna takes the horse, a figure culturally associated with energy, speed and mastery, but suspends its action in order to confront it with a «Penthouse» cover. The juxtaposition does not construct a simple contrast between nature and artifice. Rather, it shows how media reality can appropriate the force of a living being and recode it according to its own categories, turning physical presence into an advertising attribute. The title repeats the editorial formula and extends its ambiguity across the image: the word «pet» oscillates among recognition, possession and domestication.

The commanding scale of the horse and its uniform yellow colouring give it a bodily presence that the dark ground separates from the world, turning vital energy into an available image, almost already prepared for reproduction. Yet this monumentality does not protect the animal from contamination. Superimposed across its forelegs, the cover interrupts painterly continuity with the graphic hardness of an editorial object and establishes a false unity between two systems of representation. The phrase «Pet of the Year» implicates the model and the horse at once: she is classified through language that makes her desirable and possessable, while the animal is drawn into the same economy of looking. The disproportion between the two elements creates no hierarchy, since the smaller insert possesses the code with which to name, and therefore govern, the larger body.

The work thus clarifies a central transition in Zampogna’s practice after Artmedia. Appropriation no longer concerns only the history of art, but extends to the commercial images that organise contemporary experience. Within «Horses», bodily strength does not appear as an intact origin opposed to the media. It is already vulnerable to their grammar, which turns qualities, identities and desires into consumable categories. An unresolved tension remains between the animal’s silent gravity and the cover’s explicit solicitation. This friction prevents the image from settling into coherence and leaves the viewer confronting the unstable boundary among admiration, eroticisation and possession.