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

Le corps travesti - Michel Journiac
Piano - Joseph Charroy
Pectus Excavatum - Quentin Yvelin
Eldorado maximum - Les commissaires anonymes
Critique & création - L.L. de Mars
Étrangement seuls - Jean-Pascal Princiaux
Le dos des choses - Guillaume Goutal
Email Diamant - Fabienne Radi
Optical Sound 3
Jean-Jacques a dit - Angèle Douche
16 x 421 - Lorraine Druon
Denver Mosaic 1961 - René Heyvaert
Le vieux père - Laurent Kropf
Rois de la forêt - Alain Garlan
Cruiser l'utopie – L'après et ailleurs de l'advenir queer - José Esteban Muñoz
Rasclose - Geoffroy Mathieu
Keywording (Post) Contemporary Art - Greta Rusttt
Image Canoë - Jérémie Gindre
La peinture c'est comme les pépites - Pierre Yves-Hélou + Tirage
Aube - Caroline Bachmann
Pas vu Pas pris - Collectif, Olivier Deloignon, Guillaume Dégé
movement in squares - Stefanie Leinhos
Génération dakou - Yann Jun + CD
Turbo Decompress - Coll.
Teddy et le Grand Terrible - Orian Mariat.
Éclats III - Athanor
Seoul Flowers & Trees - tribute to Lee Friedlander
Wayfaring - Patrick Messina, André S. Labarthe
Mosaïque d'asphalte - Jack Torrance
Dernier royaume - Quentin Derouet
Aurore Colbert - Marie Mons
Après la révolution – numéro 1
Le laboratoire de fermentation - Ludovic Burel
Le Choix du peuple - Nicolas Savary, Tilo Steireif 































