Tempi di Covid 4

Within the «COVID» cycle, the work turns an ordinary gesture of coexistence between a man and an animal into the measure of a freedom subject to rules, showing how the pandemic rewrote both public space and everyday experience. Zampogna does not represent the exceptional nature of the emergency, but the way it settles into minimal actions: going out, walking, accompanying a dog. The scene thus belongs to his research into the contamination of “real reality” and “media reality,” but here the interference does not arise solely from a public image superimposed on life. Life itself appears already disciplined by the codes, devices, and images of the pandemic.

The man’s bent posture, covered face, and proximity to the dog compress the walk into a hesitant movement, closer to a monitored stay than to free passage. The animal preserves a connection with a concrete, bodily necessity, while the human figure seems to lose substance, crossed by a pattern that makes his outlines precarious. The fabric’s motif, populated by hot air balloons and decorative forms, introduces a paradoxical promise of travel and lightness precisely where movement appears circumscribed. The broad oval form supporting the figures does not define a recognizable place. Instead, it acts as a visual enclosure, a portion of experience permitted and isolated from the rest of the field.

The fabric therefore does not receive the scene as a simple ground, but absorbs it into an ornamental repertoire poised between domestic setting, childhood imagery, and circulating communication. Through this interpenetration, Zampogna avoids both reportage and the consoling symbol. The man and dog remain recognizable, yet their presence is made fragile by the very surface that preserves them. The work adds a subdued dimension of restriction to the cycle: not the authority of protocols or the theatricality of public images, but the silent transformation of habit. What remains is a freedom reduced to a minimal route, still practicable yet now inseparable from control and vulnerability.