New FMR Magazine: No.17

Under the guidance of Marilena Ferrari – a cultural impresario for whom the unstinting pursuit of quality is nothing less than a raison d’être – our review is making a further qualitative leap forward with the broadening and reformulating of its own by now well-established identity.
Each issue will have more pages, and be printed on three alternating types of fine paper. Thus the review too, like our books, will have not only the appearance but also the feel of a distinctly precious object, making the turning of every page a source of that sensual pleasure with which bibliophiles are well acquainted.
Each issue will be a volume in itself: lined up with its fellows, it will take its place as part of a sumptuous history of the arts, labyrinthine and Babelesque, in homage to Borges, our guardian spirit. There is no set route to be taken: the pleasures of discovery, curiosity and, above all, the exercising of a fine-tuned intelligence, are paramount.
Each issue will contain articles in the form of images, variants of the well-established philosophy of the “FMR look,” and articles in the form of words, conducted on the fertile borderland where various specialist cultures merge and intersect with literature. In the article featured on the cover of this issue, for example, Pascal Lainé, winner of both the Prix Médicis and the Prix Goncourt, engages with the myth of Phryne as it occurs in both art and literature.
From now on, too, the usual headings will be joined by three new ones.
The first of these, Stories of the Eye, consists of essays in the form of images by various outstanding photographic auteurs, and is inaugurated here with Luca Campigotto’s photographs of Cairo, published here for the first time.
The second, Stories from Art, on the other hand, recalls the grand old tradition of the feuilleton, and begins with the legendary Arria Marcella by Théophile Gautier. This section consists of literary texts, either pre-existing or specially written for FMR by some of the leading figures of the young generation of international writers, occupying the territory where the artistic world becomes, in its turn, the subject of, or pretext for, fictional representation.
The third heading, Ad Hoc, is a sort of concluding comment on the issue in question and takes the form of a work by an important contemporary artist:
the first to occupy this spot is Mel Ramos, an inspired exponent of American Pop Art, who has chosen for us a statue/pin-up in the form of an image perfectly poised between the historical and the topical.
So, three new headings, and one revival: Ephemeris is back, retrieved from earlier times and now replacing the Guide for the inquisitive traveller. Rather than being a mere bulletin, offering the kind of exhaustive coverage widely available in other publications, or on the web, Ephemeris offers carefully selected information, and marginal notes, on the best exhibitions worldwide.
But the magazine will continue to bear its own distinctive hallmark. Some things may come and go, but
not our way of looking – established over one hundred and eighty issues, and twenty-five years.

Flaminio Gualdoni