Senza titolo 4

Within Butchers, Senza titolo 4 stages the defusing of violence by turning flesh into a consumable image that ornament receives, while painterly matter restores its irreducible bodily residue. The work does not represent the bloody moment of killing, but what follows: the normalization of the animal body as a manipulable object, detached from life and consigned to the familiarity of an ordinary gesture. Zampogna thus gives a domestic outcome to the contamination between “real reality” and “media reality” that runs through his research. Violence is not concealed, but made available to sight through a surface capable of assimilating it.

The wallpaper, crowded with leaves, fruit and a monkey, absorbs the act of handling into a nature already converted into a decorative repertoire. The animal presence, divided between unidentified flesh and the small exotic figure, restores no natural order. Instead, it shows how living being, food and ornament can enter the same visual system. At the centre, hands hold a vessel and a mass of flesh without offering a face or body to which responsibility might be assigned. The gesture therefore appears impersonal, almost self-sufficient. Yet the pink drips that pass beyond the vessel disrupt ornamental composure and return the image to the physical gravity of flesh.

The work sharpens the critical core of Butchers: contemporary drama lies not only in violence, but in the ease with which violence loses intensity when organized as an image. Here the decorated support does not serve as a background to the subject. It makes the subject compatible with a pleasant, repeatable and consumable visual environment. Painting nonetheless introduces a discrepancy that decoration cannot close. What drips outside the vessel remains as an excess, a bodily sign that resists neutralization. The viewer is not given an exceptional scene, but the unease of recognizing how ordinary the separation between flesh and life can become.