Even mummified and bolted to a wall, the Kenny Adams Eve threatens to overwhelm its restraints. Scarpitta found the wreckage serendipitous. He had the billboard towed from the highway and into the studio, in fact, much of his art follows this route, whereby the emblems and objects of transport find their way into his studio. Lightning is a traditional symbol for artistic discovery, and Scarpitta discovers, in the broken form of the billboard, a metaphor that declaims the ultimate triumph of art over commerce. In this sign, his title states, art conquers.
Nature is sublime, inchoate, and insensate.
Only art can provide a conveyance between the ancient and neophyte modes of truth. Scarpitta, the American Prometheus, mines the lightning for meaning in full, discovering in the collaboration a metamorphic power. Scarpitta s works have been delivered, by parthenogenesis, from a voluminous, extravagant, and unceasingly active mind.