Brand Sheet · KOB-BS-05 · 2025–2026
Franz Cerami
Editorial system
Franz Cerami works on the border between painting and the moving image. Each work begins on paper, in oil and graphite; moves into digital painting; is animated; and ends up projected onto a dome, a façade, a disused blast furnace. The portrait is his recurring subject: the other as a mirror.
In two years three projects called for a book: Alter Oculus, twelve works among the empty frames and the dome of a church; Lighting Flowers, flowers of light projected onto the former Italsider steelworks in Bagnoli; Jute Portraits, the faces of the Kenyan coffee supply chain, printed on jute and projected onto the buildings of Nairobi.
Three different occasions, one author. What was needed was an editorial system recognisable from a distance that none of the three would outgrow.
One family carries all three books: Helvetica Neue LT Pro Condensed, from Light to Extra Black, obliques included. The condensed cut gains lines in long titles and stays neutral beside saturated images. In the Kenyan catalogue the long texts move to Minion Pro, the one moment the system opens to a serif.
Cerami's works are burning reds, yellows, electric cyans, overlays that vibrate. A layout that tries to keep up becomes noise: two saturations competing for the same page and cancelling each other out.
The choice was to remove. Black, white and one working red: colour belongs to the work, the page merely holds it. The book does not interpret: it hosts.
Black is the ground of every cover: the page becomes the dark room in which projections can be seen. The image runs full-bleed, the title rests at the lower left, with no boxes.
Red appears once per cover, on the artist's name. It does not decorate: it marks authorship. It is the one element repeated identically across the three volumes, and what makes them read as a series.
The grid holds three different formats — square for Alter Oculus and Lighting Flowers, 23 × 33 cm portrait for Jute Portraits — with the same margin proportions and the same two-column frame. The size of the sheet changes, not the way it is inhabited.
Click a swatch to copy its HEX. The first three colours are the book, the other three come from the works.
The book uses three colours: black, white and the red of the signature. The other three are sampled from the artist's works and never enter the layout — they stay inside the images. CMYK and Pantone approximated from the RGB values.
Every volume starts from a flat plan: a map of all the pages in miniature, with colours separating apparatus, critical texts, photographic sections and plates. The sequence is argued there, before a single line is laid out. For Jute Portraits that is one hundred and twenty-six pages.
The Kenyan catalogue is bilingual on the same page: Italian and English live in adjacent columns, with captions describing the work and never the name of the person portrayed — a choice the artist asked for that became a rule of the book.
Around the volumes the system extends to the invitations for the venues abroad — New Delhi, Nairobi, Podgorica — and to the artist's portfolio, which carries the same frame into landscape format. Same grammar, different supports.
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Jute Portraits is published by Editoriale Scientifica and printed by Vulcanica in Nola: 23 × 33 cm, 126 pages, Italian and English. The project was born with the Italian Embassy in Kenya, UNIDO, the Italian Cultural Institute in Nairobi and the National Museum of Kenya, where a permanent work remains.
Inside the book are the three hundred coffee supply-chain workers who sat for the artist, the workshop with students from Kenyatta University, the night projections on the façades of Nairobi, the exhibition at the United Nations.
An editorial system, when it holds, is not noticed: what is noticed is that the books share an author.