Franco Maria Ricci. Opus in Black

Franco Maria Ricci, as a creator of books and trademarks, spent his life pursuing a dedicated calling: to see other people’s images and thoughts, but filtered through a style eminently recognizable as his own. Indeed, his personality emanates from his selection and framing of objects and pictures, a “manner” that strongly marked and influenced both the Italian and the international style and characterized as well by the unfailing presence of that fifth black ink. Just as Wagner insisted on darkness in the theater, Ricci was the first to bring black into publishing as an important essence. At once a paragon and a dense impasto of all colors, darkness and black can both enhance vision, surrounding each image so as to endow it with a new form – as in the Opus in Black, which subsumes the alchemistic concept of nigredo, the first phase of the Magnum Opus. This book, published in the occasion of the exhibition dedicated to the publisher at Palazzo Ducale in Genoa, lets Franco Maria Ricci speak in his own words through the brief introductory notes to each of his published volumes and each issue of his magazine, FMR. This careful selection is arranged so the reader can follow the thread of an exemplary career and it makes clear the special lens through which he saw the world, giving it to us to see for ourselves.