A pentimento is the trace of an earlier image showing through a later one, and that's exactly what this print stages: coral-red blooms and blue-green foliage scattered densely across a heavily mottled, dot-textured ground, with a fragment of antique lettering visible faintly beneath the pattern.
Large enough to carry a whole tart or cake to the table, the pedestal works just as well left out on its own once the plate is cleared, the layered print holding its own as an object in the room rather than only a serving piece.
Dimensions: 22.9 × 30.5 cm. Made in New York City.
Material: Collaged paper beneath hand-blown glass.
ABOUT the MAKER
John Derian
Since 1989, John Derian has worked from a single New York studio, turning the technique of decoupage into a signature practice of its own. Each object begins with a print pulled from his archive of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century engravings and illustrations: botanical studies, maritime scenes, playing cards, birds, and fragments of natural history. Trained artisans cut the images by hand, layer them beneath hand-blown glass, and seal them so the paper becomes part of the object itself, not simply applied to its surface. The result sits somewhere between a functional object and a small work of art: a paperweight, a desk cup, a cake pedestal, a tray. We carry the collection at Tessuti because each piece holds its history openly. The prints are old, the glass is blown by hand, and no two pieces are ever quite identical, so what arrives on a shelf or a desk carries a little of the studio it came from. These are pieces meant to be used and lived with rather than kept for display alone, gathering the marks of everyday life the way any well-loved object does over time.
