FORMAS is the first artist’s monograph by Francesco Balzano, a French designer and photographer. The project arose from a reconnection with his father, whom he met again after many years, and unfolds as an intimate journey—a pilgrimage through Italy in search of his father’s homeland. The analog photographs gathered along the way are fragments of memory: faces, details, glimpses of landscape that restore the poetry of a thread repaired.
Not a traditional book but an artistic object, its pages fold and unfold upon themselves, evoking the shifting nature of memory—overlapping, resurfacing, and transforming over time. The reader is invited to compose their own narrative, as if sifting through a handful of memories. The essential, silent black-and-white images recall a classical, ancient sensibility, where form and chiaroscuro achieve their full expressiveness.
FORMAS presents itself as a precious artifact, wrapped in a cloth letterpress cover bearing a quotation from Ovid’s Metamorphoses: a shroud enveloping a body of images in constant transformation, a tribute to the author’s poetic sensitivity and formal rigor.