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Flesh becomes the point at which the material body and its media construction reveal their mutual vulnerability. Within the Meat cycle, the work belongs to the period immediately following the Artmedia experience: appropriation no longer concerns only the repertoire of twentieth-century art, but extends to editorial images, advertising, and figures from contemporary culture. Zampogna thus carries the method of extraction into a figurative painting in which organic presence offers no access to a more authentic reality. The animal body and the printed images already belong to the same system of display, consumption, and substitution.

The animal mass, enlarged until it occupies almost the entire field and eroded by the dominant green, loses all naturalism: flesh appears both concrete and spectral, deprived of the color that might make it immediately recognizable as living or slaughtered matter. Painting does not restore the body’s integrity, but turns it into an uncertain surface close to a screen-printed reproduction. The two editorial inserts intensify this instability. The cosmetics panel promises the correction and presentability of the face, while the lower photograph, associated in the record with Lucio Dalla and Mimmo Paladino, introduces a cultural identity entrusted to the public circulation of images. Their reduced scale does not make them marginal. They act as windows that recode the animal mass, making flesh the repressed term upon which beauty, recognizability, and prestige depend.

The work therefore anticipates the contamination of “real reality” and “media reality” that would become central to Zampogna’s later research, but here it articulates that relationship through a still abrasive friction. The advertisement does not conceal the body, and painting does not simply unmask advertising. Both show that every presence, biological or social, is made available to vision through mechanisms of selection and consumption. What remains is not a resolved opposition between authenticity and artifice, but a common material in which the body, the face, and the public figure risk the same loss of substance.