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The work stages the defusing of violence by turning the labour of butchery into an image that decoration and display make ordinary. In the Butchers series, Zampogna transfers to animal flesh a problem already central to his research: the way a concrete fact loses intensity when it is delivered to a visual code that makes it available, familiar and consumable. The scene does not brutally oppose body and executioner. It includes them within the same regime of visibility, where professional action separates from its consequences and drama can appear with the naturalness of an established habit.

The floral weave invades man, meat and setting, absorbing violence into ornament. Mixed media on fabric does not merely support the scene, but disrupts its hierarchy: the decorative pattern surfaces through the forms, weakens their boundaries and draws the worked body towards the same condition as the ground. The man’s frontality, suspended between an act of labour and a pose, also converts the action into a displayed image. His gaze interrupts the operation without turning it into an explicit denunciation. Instead, it establishes an ambiguous threshold between individual presence and function, while the painted matter, at times denser and at others almost erased, prevents the scene from settling into a document.

This convergence of trade, decoration and image clarifies a crucial point in Zampogna’s research. The contamination between “real reality” and “media reality”, developed in earlier series, no longer depends solely on the montage of heterogeneous sources. It operates within the loss of moral distance produced by the surface itself. The work neither spectacularises violence nor conceals it. Instead, it shows the process through which violence becomes tolerable because it is integrated into an everyday order of looking. What remains is not the certainty of an accusation, but the unease of recognising how readily drama can assume the reassuring form of habit.