Tempi di Covid 12

Within the COVID cycle, the work transforms the pandemic into a conflict between containment and the desire for escape, in which protecting the body coincides with a new distance from the world. Zampogna does not illustrate a precise episode of the health emergency, at least according to the available information. Instead, he subjects an ordinary presence to the system of signs that governed collective experience in 2020. The face mask makes the body immediately historical, but its function is not limited to reportage: it interrupts the direct relationship between face, space and viewer, turning the figure into a public image of vulnerability.

The masked figure, immobilised before three fields of colour and looking upward, connects health protocol to an expectation that finds no fulfilment in real space. The yellow, blue and red rectangle does not open up depth, but introduces a graphic threshold, almost an image within the image, that further separates the subject from the surrounding environment. This stillness is answered by the fabric filled with hot air balloons: the printed motif absorbs the body into a promise of movement and makes the work oscillate between domestic surface, fantasy of travel and media setting. The support therefore participates in the tension. What should evoke flight is repeated as decoration, while the figure remains anchored to a painted base that confirms its suspension.

The work thus extends the contamination between “real reality” and “media reality” that runs through Zampogna’s practice, but brings it back to the perceptual condition of the pandemic. Escape appears not as an available experience, but as a repertoire of images already packaged, repeated and made consumable. The gravity of the moment coexists with restrained irony: the world continues to offer symbols of freedom precisely when movement is restricted. The viewer is left with a protected yet isolated presence, placed between the discipline of the present and an elsewhere reduced to ornament.