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

Talweg 6 - La distance
Étrangement seuls - Jean-Pascal Princiaux
Bande Annonce - Cinéma & Bande Dessinée - Coll.
Bienvenue à Colomeri ! - Hécate Vergopoulo,
Optical Sound 3
The Book Fight - Chihoi
America - Ayline Olukman, Hélène Gaudy
Un cheval, des silex - Benoît Maire, Sally Bonn
Goodbye - Hsia-Fei Chang, Sofia Eliza Bouratsis, Medhi Brit, Enrico Lunghi
Catalogue Art Guys - That's painting productions, Bernard Brunon
Pectus Excavatum - Quentin Yvelin
Le dos des choses - Guillaume Goutal
L'internationale modique (AND 3) - J-M. Bertoyas
Sans titre - Chris Kiss
Photographic Fields - Joël Van Audenhaege
16 x 421 - Lorraine Druon
Fluent - Laëticia Donval
Retour d'y voir - n° 1 & 2 - Mamco
interférence - 2 - maycec
Le Choix du peuple - Nicolas Savary, Tilo Steireif 































