Zampogna e Le Witt II

The work makes the language of the avant-garde interchangeable with that of merchandise, showing how both can become serial configurations offered for visual consumption. At the meeting point between Artmedia and Store Windows, Zampogna does not insert the reference to LeWitt as a tribute. Instead, he subjects it to the principle of “appropriation and sacking” that governs his research during these years. The memory of conceptual art thus enters the commercial apparatus of the shop window, where cultural value and the appeal of goods depend upon the same need to be recognised, ordered and made visible.

The geometric configuration attributed to LeWitt, isolated within a white square among the containers, loses the autonomy of a learned citation and assumes the ambiguous condition of an exhibited article. At the same time, the repetition of jars and rows of sweets turns accumulation into a chromatic grid: reds, yellows, blues and reflections in the glass organise commercial abundance through minimal variations, bringing it close to the modular logic of the appropriated image. Cibachrome records the luminous seduction of the display, while screen printing introduces an already codified sign. Their coexistence does not reconcile the two levels, but makes the distinction between the photograph of merchandise and the reproduced memory of the artwork uncertain.

This ambiguity explains why the passage from Artmedia to Store Windows does not constitute a break. The extraction of images from art history already contains Zampogna’s later interest in images that circulate, seduce and produce reality. Here the “real reality” of the shop window appears as constructed as the conceptual module, while the latter is absorbed into the visual economy of display. Zampogna therefore does not oppose art and consumption. He reveals the threshold on which they lose their respective hierarchies and survive as available signs, equivalent precisely because they are subjected to the same regime of looking.