Born out of a reflection on the nature of images and their nocturnal vocation, Better in the Dark than His Rider is both a fable and a survival guide. The collected work by Francesco Merlini spans different years, possibly quite distant from one other; shot in all four continents, his pictures reveal the unique perspective of someone who, like a sleepwalker guided by ghosts, seeks for something nameless. The title is drawn, almost literally, from a 19th century manual of optics. The original sentence – “[…] much better in the dark than his rider” – refers to a horse’s night vision compared to a human’s.
The selected sequence of pictures unravels around the transitional stage between wakefulness and sleep, engaging with hypnagogia as a sensory yet dreamlike mode of semiconscious representation. Images make up mind’s psychic contents. If in dreams self-consciousness is suspended and images look real to the extent that we are sleeping, when dozing we can consciously guide them because partially aware that we are dreaming. Stated otherwise, in lucid dreams we know we are faced with the contents of our imagination, whose edges appear hallucinatory. Dreaming is a perpetual state we do experience both asleep and awake. Thanks to imagination, the dream matter turns into the mind’s real object again.

23,5×31 cm
Hard cover with embossing
Offset UV
80 pages
Paper:
Munken Lynx Rough 150 g/m²
Fedrigoni Sirio Nero 140 g/m²
Wibalin Natural Petal

Eros negro #2 - Demoniak
In The Navy - Julien Kedryna
Ventoline 6 - Coll
Konrad Becker - Dictionnaire de réalité stratégique
Holy Mountain - Maia Matches, Knuckles & Notch
Paravents - Eva Taulois
Humoral Fortuities - Francesco Albano’s
Avec ce qu'il resterait à dire - Anne Maurel
Holyhood, vol. 1 — Guadalupe, California - Alessandro Mercuri
WREK The Algorithm! - Aarnoud Rommens, Olivier Deprez - FR
Lazy Painter - Angela Gjergjaj, Jordi Bucher and Mirco Petrini
Le chateau enchanté - Atelier Mclane
De lave et de fer - Laurent Feynerou
America - Ayline Olukman, Hélène Gaudy
Ellipse - Ismail Alaoui-Fdili
Retour d'y voir - n° 3 & 4 - Mamco
Hmm ! - C. de Trogoff
S ! Imperfect shapes, #38 - Baltic Comics Magazine
Philonimo - Le Chien de Diogène - Alice Brière-Haquet, Kazuko Matt
Do insects play ? - Johanna Tagada Hoffbeck
Philonimo - Le Canard de Wittgenstein - Alice Brière-Haquet, Loïc Gaume
Radio-Art - Tetsuo Kogawa
Objets Minces - Collectif
akaBB - tribute to Roni horn
Le corps travesti - Michel Journiac
La Colombe de Kant - Alice BRIÈRE-HAQUET / Émilie VAST
ARTZINES #1, Paris issue
Dada à Zurich – Le mot et l’image (1915-1916)Hugo Ball
Les glaciers - Lorraine Druon
Promenade au pays de l'écriture - Armando Petrucci
Après la révolution – numéro 1
Acteurs d'un film gravé. Docteur A. Infirmier O. - Annabelle Dupret, Olivier Deprez et Adolpho Avril
Oxymores - Philippe Weisbecker
Retour d'y voir - n° 1 & 2 - Mamco
interférence - 3 - maycec 































