Tempi di Covid 1

Across a green fabric animated by hot-air balloons, minute ornamental signs and linear trajectories, Zampogna inserts the nearly monochrome figure of a protected worker, caught directing a hose toward the lower edge of the image. The ground retains the fantastical lightness of a decorative repertory, while the broad dark plane crossing the composition diagonally introduces an abrupt weight, resembling a road, a barrier or a contaminated field. The mixed media does not conceal the heterogeneity of its registers: the weave of the support, the painted passages and the superimposed images remain in tension, refusing to resolve into a unified space.

What issues from the jet is not a neutral substance but an iridescent band that immediately evokes the visual language of hope circulated during the pandemic. Here, however, the rainbow undergoes an ambiguous reversal: it is sprayed like a sanitising agent, as though collective optimism, too, had to be administered, regulated and made operational. The chromatic promise touches the dark plane without dispelling it; the sign’s vividness is thus countered by the gravity of a gesture associated with emergency and restriction.

The dark, blurred presences scattered across the background appear as residual images, distant bodies or apparitions absorbed into the decoration. In this coexistence of textile fantasy and sanitary protocol, one recognises a central concern of Zampogna’s practice: the friction between lived experience and the media imaginary. The historical event is not illustrated in documentary fashion but transformed into a mental scene in which protection, isolation and public communication become elements of a single iconography.

The work therefore retains the dual tonality of the lockdown months: discipline imposed upon bodies and the insistent production of consolatory symbols. Its irony arises from the incongruity between the worker’s concrete action and the impossible coloured matter he disperses; its tragic register persists in his faceless figure and in the sombre ground dominating the scene. Zampogna does not simply oppose reality and fiction: he shows how, in an emergency, they contaminate one another and jointly shape everyday perception.