Late Baroque scrollwork runs continuously across a satin ground, the same sinuous ornament you would find carved into an eighteenth-century interior. Then someone flicked paint at it. Drips, in full American action painting style, fall across the pattern and refuse to line up with it, and the joke works precisely because the drawing underneath is so correct.
It is a lampas, the figure carried in supplementary wefts over the satin, in acetate, silk and linen, and the silk is what gives the ornament its shine against the matt of the drips. The repeat is large both ways, 76 cm vertically and 70 cm across, which is half the 140 cm width, so a single motif governs a whole drop. Eleven colourways run from the classical shades into green-yellow and ink blue. Made in Italy.
