Tempi di Covid 17

Within the COVID series, bodily protection becomes a new form of exposure: what should remove the individual from danger delivers them to a public image that is anonymous and wholly regulated by the emergency. Zampogna thus brings the contamination between “real reality” and “media reality” inside the face itself. He does not oppose lived experience to its representation, but shows how the pandemic made them inseparable, entrusting personal recognisability to standardised signs of safety. The subject functions not as an identifiable portrait, but as the figure of a presence turned into a role, exposed through the very instruments that ensure its survival.

The overlap of mask and visor erases the features without eliminating the gaze, turning the face into a threshold between the individual and collective protocol. The eyes remain perceptible behind several surfaces, yet this persistence does not restore a stable identity. Instead, it measures the distance introduced by a filtered visibility that is both necessary and dehumanising. The geometric design of the fabric frames and crosses the figure, assimilating the protective equipment into a ready-made, repeatable visual grammar. The red field behind the head intensifies the apparition, while circles, bands and black points remove depth from the space. The support therefore does not receive an isolated body, but incorporates it into a pattern suspended between domestic decoration, signage and screen.

Compared with Zampogna’s earlier media mythologies, what operates here is not advertising’s promise of a desirable identity, but the shared obligation to become recognisable through anonymity. The emergency produces its own iconography, immediately legible and potentially interchangeable, in which care, risk and discipline coincide. Mixed media on fabric preserves the friction between painted figure and preprinted motif, preventing the image from closing into pandemic reportage. What remains is a question about contemporary presence: how much of the individual survives when every access to the face must pass through a collective code of protection?