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In this work from Butchers, the violence of slaughter loses its exceptional character because labor on the animal body and domestic ornament are forced to share the same surface. Zampogna does not construct a spectacular antagonism between victim and executioner. Instead, he subjects the scene to the defusing of drama that defines the series, allowing a bloody act to take on the appearance of an everyday task. The wallpaper also introduces an incongruous domestic memory, in which the consumption of meat seems already returned to the reassuring environment that normally removes its origin from view.

The skinned carcass, suspended vertically and almost parallel to the worker, turns the relationship between the two bodies into an operational proximity: one is exposed matter, the other a presence concentrated in action, yet both participate in the same pictorial stillness. The wallpaper’s floral pattern breaks down any separation by passing across the clothing and making the human figure partly permeable. Ornament therefore does not simply receive the scene. It invades and normalizes it, bringing leaves, fruit and flowers to the surface where one would expect the body to retain its own consistency. Even the red of the flesh resonates with the small chromatic accents in the ground, so that the sign of injury risks being read as a variation within the decoration.

This proximity makes the image more troubling than an explicit denunciation. Zampogna does not intensify the drama, but reveals the cultural mechanism that makes it tolerable: the conversion of violence into procedure, image and consumable surface. Within the artist’s development, the longstanding contamination between “real reality” and “media reality” here assumes a material and domestic form. What should keep life, death and labor distinct is leveled by ornament, leaving the viewer with the unease of recognizing how readily habit can turn an irreversible event into background.