アメリカ人アーティスト、ジミー・デ・サナ（Jimmy DeSana）の作品集。本書は、1988年にニューヨークの「パット・ハーン・ギャラリー（Pat Hearn Gallery）」で開催された個展に伴い制作された冊子の複製・再現版である。イメージと詩を収録したささやかな一冊であり、本展覧会は、作者にとって最後のシリーズである『Salvation』を定義づけることとなった抽象写真作品を紹介したことで評判が広がった。

収録されている18篇の詩は喪失や未知なるものに触れており、集大成の一作である『Salvation』のテーマに通じるところがありながらも、より幅広い感情の在り方を許容する形而上学的、格言的、時に不条理主義的な性質を帯びている。聖アウレリウス・アウグスティヌス（St. Augustine）、ニーチェ（Nietzsche）、ピカソ（Picasso）の引用で締めくくられ、作者の詩がラベルのように扱われているが、曖昧で解釈の余地を残す構成は普遍的な空気を醸し出し、豊かなニュアンスと独特な雰囲気を存分に備えた作者の内的・外的な世界を読み解くことができる。詩に伴って展示を飾る写真のうちの3点を収録したが、その写真のように、本書は表現の明晰な解釈を避け、代わりに抽象的で断片的な自己を映し出す。作者が冒頭で述べるように「魂の一部は、魂の全てと同等なのだ」。

Quotations from Jimmy DeSana is a small book of poems and images created by the artist to accompany his exhibition at Pat Hearn Gallery in 1988. This show was notable for introducing the artist’s work with photographic abstraction—a style that would come to define his final body of work, Salvation.

The 18 poems included in this publication share some of the themes of Salvation, touching on loss and the unknown, but they are imbued with a metaphysical, aphoristic, and at times absurdist quality that allows for a more expansive range of emotions. Although DeSana’s poems are labeled as quotations—and are bookended by quotes from St. Augustine, Nietzsche, and Picasso—the elliptical and open-ended structure of the works give them an air of universality, offering a nuanced and atmospheric reading of the artist’s interior and exterior worlds. Like the photographs in the exhibition that they accompanied, three of which are reproduced in the book, Quotations from Jimmy DeSana resists a clear reading of representation, offering an abstracted and fragmented version of self in its place. As DeSana states in the publication’s opening work, “a part of my soul, is the same as the whole.”

Jimmy DeSana (1949-1990) grew up in Atlanta, GA, and received his bachelor’s degree from the Georgia State University in 1972 before relocating to New York’s East Village in the early 1970s. Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include The Sodomite Invasion: Experimentation, Politics and Sexuality in the work of Jimmy DeSana and Marlon T. Riggs, Griffin Art Projects, Vancouver, Canada, 2020, and Remainders, Pioneer Works, Brooklyn, NY, 2016. DeSana’s work can be found in numerous public collections including the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, among others. A major retrospective of DeSana’s work was exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum, New York, in early 2023, accompanied by a catalogue co-published by the Brooklyn Museum and DelMonico Books.