Daydream Studio: The Projects That Live Before the Material

There's an image I keep returning to. A massive industrial roller, a hand-pulled print on rough paper, the studio dissolved into something closer to a working yard. It's not a project I've made. Not yet. Maybe not ever. But I've seen it now — and seeing it has changed something.

This is what I've started calling the Daydream Studio: the space, just before Pentimento, where I let myself imagine the works I haven't built. Sculptures too large for my room. Etchings pulled under the weight of machines I don't own. Installations with rooms I don't have. For years these projects lived only as notes, half-sketches, conversations that ended with "one day".

Generative AI has given me a way to see them.

I treat these visions as a kind of pre-Pentimento. They are not finished works — they are the daydream stage, the moment of imagining, made temporarily visible. Some of them will stay as visions. Others, slowly, will move toward matter: into a print, an etching, an acrylic glass piece, an actual roller and actual ink. That translation, when it happens, is where the real work begins. The material always has the final word.

But the daydream matters too. It clarifies intention. It lets me test ideas at the speed of thought, and decide which ones are worth the slowness of craft.

I keep a diary of these visions on Instagram — short videos, fragments, studio imaginings. If you'd like to follow along as some of them eventually find their way into physical form, you can find me here: https://www.instagram.com/guidosalimbeni/ 

The studio, after all, has always been partly imaginary. Now I just have a way to show you what I see.