BETWEEN THE CORNERS OF MY BED is a fairly straight continuation of my filmmaking practice. As an experimental filmmaker I used to work directly on the film emulsion as if it was a canvas. So, I drew, painted or scratched each frame, frame by frame, whether it was a Super8 or a 16mm. short. But I had grown dissatisfied with the impermanence of the moving image. I wanted something more substantial and concrete than a fleeting retinal impression. Intrigued by the possibilities offered by the technique of photogravure, to reproduce a photographic image with all gradations between black and white with etching ink on quality paper, I took a class with master printer Lothar Osterburg.
That was the beginning of my venture in the field of printmaking as I was immediately fascinated by photogravure, by its results and by the process, with all its difficult, laborious and challenging steps. It took me some time to master the process, I found it rewarding and frankly exhilarating. After several prints, a few portfolios and two books that I did for practice, I decided to embark on a much larger project. I would give it a structure and a narrative that would be the vehicle to carry a large number of photogravures that — like the travelogue/diaristic films I was familiar with —would reflect the world around me, my experiences and my thoughts derived from haphazard reading of Heidegger’s philosophy.
Having established form and content, for over a year, in 2007 and in 2008, I dived in, making plates at the Manhattan Graphics Center in New York, often several at once, and printing them in my studio, two at the same time on one piece of paper (an additional challenge) in an edition of eight. All the photographs (with the exception of C.E. Gadda’s opposite the composite image of G.W. Bush with Atta, the 9/11 terrorist, and Duchamp’s urinal) are original photographs that I either took in those days or had taken when I had first arrived in New York in the late 70s. To maintain the narrative aspect of the book, I grouped the photogravures into different loose “sequences” that deal with NYC, the neighborhood, daily living, art, nature, news, Tuscany…and interspersed them with aquatints that depict the actual corners of the loft bed (pictured in the last pages of the book) that my wife and I built in the loft on the Bowery which — by the way — belonged to Andy Warhol, our landlord (and Jean Michel Basquiat was our neighbour).
Above the loft bed there is a skylight that is represented and sketched throughout the book with different printmaking techniques as if spotted at different times during that restless night. Two of the seven copies of the book were bound by Henry Bookbindings, an Hasidic Jew who livesand works in a dark, crammed and timeless basement in Henry Street on the Lower East Side.

Franco Marinai, Serrazzano 2022

 

All photogravures are available in one copy, signed and numbered 8/8. Please contact us for price and availability.