Cesare Reggiani

Daimon

A Folder containing a double book in a hardcover bind, 48 pages each.

Size 28x21 cm closed.

Total size: 31x23 cm.

Edition: 200 copies.

Introduction text in English, Italian.

The Artist’s Book “Daimon” was presented the first time in 2014 at Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Faenza, Italy, with a large installation of 50 black and white drawings and a movie.

Reggiani worked digitally on the original drawings for the second book. Then, the digital files had been destroyed at the end of the work.

A part of the whole artwork is reproduced in the pages of this double album.

This Artist’s Book, Daimon, is divided into two parts, almost as if to emphasise a duplicity of being: a reality (in black and white) and a possibility (colour). Animal stylised red silhouettes also enter into the field in the colours part, symbol of a condition precluded to man.

Animals as an example of a dignity and of a beauty that do not need claims and justifications. Such are Reggiani’s Daimons: the Daimon of every true artist.

Everything, in Reggiani, takes place in a crepuscular dimension, and tinged with melancholy. That same melancholy that still shines from the eyes of the great classical statuary and of the offspring such as Dürer that made a sod of grass and a small hare monumental and eternal, and himself with them, with a fear at the same time of failing in the task and of having to live in a perpetual state of searching and waiting.

The Daimon appears and disappears, between colour and black and white, and Reggiani chases them with weapons only of a “barren, hard classical poetry” (T.S. Eliot). The result is uncertain but nothing else is needed.

Let’s go with him!