'FORMAS' by Francesco Balzano (2025)
FORMAS is the first artist’s monograph by Francesco Balzano, a French designer and photographer. The project stems from the rediscovery of his father after many years apart and unfolds as an intimate journey—a pilgrimage from North to South of Italy, through the landscapes of his paternal homeland. The analog photographs collected are fragments of memory: faces, details, glimpses of landscapes that evoke the poetry of a relationship restored. Not a traditional book, but an editorial object: the pages fold and unfold onto themselves, evoking the shifting nature of memory, which overlaps, resurfaces, and transforms over time. The reader is invited to freely compose their own narrative, as if sifting through a handful of memories. The essential, silent black and white recalls a classical, timeless imagery, where forms and contrasts assume their full expressive power. FORMAS presents itself as a precious relic, wrapped in a letterpress cover embossed with a literary excerpt from Ovid’s Metamorphoses: a shroud enveloping a body of images in constant metamorphosis, an homage to the poetic sensitivity and formal rigor of the author.
