Rajo - Jack Spl, 1964

After his figurative works of the immediate postwar period, where various expressionist and Post-Cubist accents emerge, Scarpitta developed his signature work in the second half of the 1950s, with a combination of pictorial and sculptural attributes. The stretcher frame becomes a structure around which he stretches strips of canvas, interwoven and overlapping, to compose a mosaic that does not consist of juxtaposed tiles but is innervated with colors that assume the corporeality of the folds and the contracted energy of the stretched fabric. In later pieces the intersection of the strips is covered by a unified surface of color, like a slow sedimentation of time or a natural growth of mold. [...]