Critical text
The work transforms the wealth promised by gambling into an all encompassing landscape, where the childish desire for possession is educated by the same iconography that claims to satisfy it. In the «Scratch & Win» series, Zampogna transfers the grammar of the prize from the promotional card to the space of experience, making the subject part of the device that seduces them. Here fortune is presented not as a possible event, but as a predetermined environment. The imagery of Scrooge McDuck links accumulation, play and innocence, making an economic fantasy produced by mass culture appear natural.
The yellow field scattered with coins and gold bars eliminates any space foreign to wealth and converts the image into a continuous surface of accumulation, with no outside from which desire might recognise itself as a construction. Against this saturation, the child in grey retains the uncertain density of a presence taken from reality, yet the absorbed posture does not interrupt the surrounding code. The discrepancy between the restrained body and Scrooge McDuck’s gloved hand, suspended above it with the impersonal assurance of a cartoon, brings together two incongruous registers: the vulnerability of waiting and the weightless abundance of fiction. The mixed media keeps this discontinuity visible rather than reconciling it.
Unlike other works in the series, where words, instructions and combinations assign the individual the role of contestant, here the entire visual imaginary shapes desire before the game has even begun. The promise of a prize coincides with a sentimental education in possession, entrusted to a popular character able to make accumulation seem familiar and festive. The work’s irony is therefore inseparable from its gravity. Wealth is everywhere, but only as an image, while the human presence remains suspended at the threshold of a catharsis that the device can repeat indefinitely without ever granting it.
