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

Fluent - Laëticia Donval
9 octobre 1977 - Roberto Varlez
À partir de n°3 - Collectif
Revue La Ronde n°14
Alma Mater n°1
Un essai sur la typographie - Eric Gill
Le Gabion - Théo Robine-Langlois
Sillo n°3 - Le Fauve
Saint Julien l'hospitalier Tome 3 - Claire Pedot
D’l’or - Rosanna Puyol Boralevi
Good Company - Paul Van der Eerden
Rue Englelab, La révolution par les livres - Iran 1979 - 1983 - Hannah Darabi
Retour d'y voir - n° 1 & 2 - Mamco
Photographic Fields - Joël Van Audenhaege
Der Erste Rotkehlchen - Le livre
Aurore Colbert - Marie Mons
Gruppen n°14 - Collectif
Optical Sound 3
Sans titre - Benjamin Hartmann
Les glaciers - Lorraine Druon
Optical Sound 2
(page 1 et 17) - Lorraine Druon
Cuadernos - Henry Deletra
Gnose & Gnose & Gnose - Aymeric Vergnon-d'Alençon
Titanic Orchestra - Julien Mauve
Gros Gris n°4 - Duel
Assembly - Sam Porritt
Critique & création - L.L. de Mars
Le dos des choses - Guillaume Goutal
Vacuité 9090 - Jérémy Piningre
People in a faraday cage - Stéphanie Gygax
Piano - Joseph Charroy
Mökki n°4
Dernier royaume - Quentin Derouet
Illusive prosody - Alex Beaurain
Le Choix du peuple - Nicolas Savary, Tilo Steireif
Hérésie Étiologique - coll.
Link Human / Robot - Collectif dir. Emmanuelle Grangier
Imagos - Noémie Lothe
Champs libres - Gwen Le Gac
Bande Annonce - Cinéma & Bande Dessinée - Coll.
In the presence of being absent... Arrgh. - Stéphanie Leinhos
La grande surface de réparation - Gilles Pourtier
Recto Versu - Bill Noir
Strates & Archipels - Pierre Merle
Temps d'arrêt - Etienne Buyse 































