Drawings for Dante. - Marcel Dzama

DZAMA, Marcel. 
Drawings for Dante. 
First edition. 4to. Unpaginated. Colour illustrations throughout. Illustrated boards. London: Timothy Taylor Gallery, 2002. 

This book from Marcel Dzama, Canadian artist and member of the collaborative group The Royal Art Lodge, was published on the occasion of an exhibition of his work at the Timothy Taylor Gallery in London in 2002. Dzama’s small and delicate drawings, hand-tinted with watercolor and rootbeer, have an eccentric aesthetic sensibility. The compositions of cartoon-ish creatures combine references that are at once intellectually highbrow and reminiscent of retro pop culture from the Roaring Twenties and Fifties. The disconnected and darkly humorous images are linked by their psychological tension and by the fact that they were all made while the artist was reading Dante Alighieri’s ‘Inferno’. A collage of writing and drawings on lined notebook paper makes up the “essay” in this otherwise purely visual introduction to Dzama’s work that Dave Eggers has described as “two percent wit, ninety-eight percent fragile, fragile beauty.“