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

twen [1959–1971]
Cuadernos - Henry Deletra
Dans la Lune - Fanette Mellier
Promenade au pays de l'écriture - Armando Petrucci
Mökki n°4
Tchat - Gary Colin
Étrangement seuls - Jean-Pascal Princiaux
Zoom Age - Julien Auregan
L'inventaire des destructions - Éric Watier
Éclats III - Athanor
Le vieux père - Laurent Kropf
SKKS - Gilles Pourtier
Illusive prosody - Alex Beaurain
Jérôme LeGlatin (avec Mel Crawford) - Le Crash
La troisième oreille et autres textes + CD - Bryan Lewis Saunders
OKATAOKA MEETS FOLK ART SERIES “HELLO MEXICO”
Good Company - Paul Van der Eerden
Saint Julien l'hospitalier Tome 1 - Claire Pedot
Dessins pour Rugir - Virginie Rochetti
Salt Crystal - Fabio Parizzi
The Shelf - Journal 3
Optical Sound 3
Vacuité 9090 - Jérémy Piningre
Dear Paul - Paul Van der Eerden
Holyhood, vol. 1 — Guadalupe, California - Alessandro Mercuri
We want to look up at the Sun, but could the Sun be looking down on us? - Rudy Guedj & Olivier Goethals
Roven n°5
Rasclose - Geoffroy Mathieu
Bambi # 4 - Collectif
Retour d'y voir - n° 1 & 2 - Mamco
Der Erste Rotkehlchen - Le livre
Polyphème (d'après Euripide) - J. & E. LeGlatin
Prose postérieure - Les commissaires anonymes
Les glaciers - Lorraine Druon
Tupera Tupera Postcard Book
Wayfaring - Patrick Messina, André S. Labarthe 































