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The work transforms labor performed upon an animal body into an image of consumption, showing that contemporary violence becomes tolerable when decoration disperses its intensity. In the Butchers cycle, Zampogna does not simply oppose victim and executioner, but examines the process through which their proximity loses urgency and becomes an assimilable scene. The precise action performed by the man cannot be fully determined from the image, and this uncertainty removes the subject from reportage: what matters is the productive gesture applied to a body already exposed to transformation into matter and image.

The repetition of red forms resembling sections of meat passes across man, animal, and setting, converting anatomy into an ornamental motif. These emblems do not merely frame the episode. They interrupt its continuity and make real flesh, decorative sign, and textile surface interchangeable. The oblique wooden structure restraining the animal body also presents the operation as if on a stage device: everyday labor acquires the rigidity of a representation, while the magenta field below preserves its chromatic gravity without resolving it into an explicit narrative of blood. The fabric thus absorbs every stable distinction between figure and ground, making contamination the work’s actual subject.

Compared with the earlier superimpositions of “real reality” and “media reality,” mediation here does not arrive through a recognizable advertising window, but is internalized within the image’s structure. The drama is not erased. It is distributed, repeated, and made decorative until it loses any single center. Butchers thereby carries Zampogna’s research toward a critique of defused drama, in which the issue is not only the violence exercised upon the body, but the ease with which the contemporary gaze can absorb it as surface, procedure, and routine.