Rosso di sera bel tempo si.. stima

Within «15 Portrait 15 Poets», Donato Di Stasi is placed between the jammed wisdom of the proverb and the impersonal verdict of the scratchcard, two collective codes that attempt to administer his identity without exhausting it. Zampogna returns here to the encounter between “real reality” and “media reality” that runs through his practice, but concentrates it on the relationship between face, common language and personal recognition. The poet is not celebrated as a figure detached from the signs of the present. Instead, he enters a device in which proverbial tradition and the logic of the prize reduce experience and the future to formulas already available.

The incongruous ending «stima», meaning “esteem”, removes the proverb from weather prediction and redirects it towards a judgement of value. The error is not merely a verbal game. It introduces into the portrait a question about measuring a person through reputation, while the adjacent «Non hai vinto», meaning “You have not won”, converts that measure into the blunt outcome of an anonymous procedure. Turquoise abrasions cross face, frame and words without distinguishing between private image and public code. They fracture continuity but do not erase Di Stasi’s recognisability, which persists as a concrete resistance within a surface treated like a printed image, worn down and returned to circulation.

Compared with the earlier «Scratch & Win» works, where the promise of wealth organised the figure’s entire environment, here the grammar of the game enters portraiture and unsettles its commemorative function. The proverb, rather than preserving a shared memory, also becomes material exposed to error and substitution. The work thus connects poetic identity not to a presumed inner self, but to the capacity to remain legible among languages that assign value, prediction and success. What remains is not a pacified image of the poet and friend, but a presence that survives the systems intended to define it.