Better in the dark than his rider

Better in the Dark Than His Rider - Born from 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. Francesco Merlini's collected work spans several years, sometimes quite far apart; taken on four continents, his images reveal the unique perspective of someone who, like a sleepwalker guided by ghosts, searches for something unspeakable. The title is taken, almost literally, from a 19th-century manual on optics. The original phrase - "[...] much better in the dark than his rider" - refers to a horse's night vision compared to that of a human. \n \nThe selected sequence of images is structured around the transition phase between wakefulness and sleep, and focuses on hypnagogia as a sensory and dreamlike mode of semi-conscious representation. Images constitute the psychic content of the mind. If, in dreams, self-consciousness is suspended and images seem real to the extent that we are asleep, when we are dozing we can consciously guide them because we are partially aware that we are dreaming. In other words, in lucid dreams we know that we are confronted with the content of our imagination, the contours of which seem hallucinatory. Dreaming is a perpetual state that we experience both asleep and awake. Through imagination, the matter of the dream becomes the real object of the mind again.