Lot Essay
Scarpa consistently explored the potential of ambiguity between form and surface. This rare dish, from 1942, exhibits almost total liberation from stylistic or referential restraints, to instead summon a free-form outline loosely applied with apparently random colored trails. Enhanced by a lightly iridized surface to suggest age, the dish translates as a fragment of something once larger, now softened and smoothed by the passage of the waters of time.