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The work stages the defusing of violence by absorbing the labour of the butcher’s shop into an ornamental pattern that makes slaughterers and animal parts of the same visual environment. In the Butchers series, Zampogna does not insist on the exceptional nature of the bloody act, but on the ease with which it can become an ordinary image, readily available to the gaze. The contamination between “real reality” and “media reality”, central to his practice, assumes a bodily form here: the material fact of flesh is translated into a surface on which action, setting, and decoration lose their autonomy.

The floral fabric passes through bodies, clothes, and carcass, weakening their boundaries and converting the bloody scene into decorative continuity. The support does not simply receive the image, but disarms it: vegetal motifs reappear within the figures and make the event waver between document, painting, and domestic ornament. The tight overlap of the two human figures with the carcass also compresses working gesture and animal matter into a single knot, denying violence any representational distance. Faces remain secondary to postures and arms, so that individual identity yields to the impersonal repetition of an operation. The red traces preserve the scene’s physical weight, yet they are dispersed within the fabric’s chromatic rhythm, where they risk appearing as one motif among others.

This coexistence without apparent friction constitutes the work’s critical core. Zampogna does not erase the drama, but shows the process through which its evidence is made tolerable, consumable, and finally decorative. Compared with the earlier advertising mythologies and the promises of Scratch & Win, mediation in Butchers does not arrive from outside as writing or a superimposed image: it is incorporated into the support and penetrates the scene. The gaze is therefore left with an uncomfortable responsibility, to recognise violence precisely where the image seems to have pacified it.