In summer 2025 Misesti created an illustrated story for the 8x8 artist’s book collection by IL SALOTTO Art Gallery.
The 8x8 series is composed of handmade artist’s books in the 8 × 8 cm format, crafted from fine papers in a limited number of copies, each containing an original artwork.
The 8x8 series is composed of handmade artist’s books in the 8 × 8 cm format, crafted from fine papers in a limited number of copies, each containing an original artwork.
IN NUCE (in a nutshell) by Michele Caldarelli
I believe that everyone, as a child, has played with the dandelion “puffball,” scattering its “parachutes” into the air—perhaps entrusting their flight with a wish, with a single breath, just like blowing out the candles on a birthday cake.
An action which, while following the survival strategy of that botanical species, symbolically fulfills the need to project one’s own soul pneumatically beyond the fence of destiny. A physical act that is at the same time intellectual, if not even spiritual; a “child’s game” as it is sometimes represented in alchemical treatises.
Such a game conveys an existential urgency, imagining it floating together with the “parachutes” carrying the plant’s genome; it transports an intellectual “source code” that makes the expressed wish similar to a seed, waiting for fertile soil to welcome its germination.
A game that, in nuce, concerns—indeed closely—the imagination of Misesti, who with this comic gives a fresh theoretical contribution to the development of the 8x8 Collection.
Through drawing, he practices a true exercise in intellectual survival and creates a multi-layered autobiographical narrative, combining his life experience—stretched between two cultures—with the playful language of comics.
From this are born the autobiographical adventures of the seed/idea with its “apprenticeship” of flight/navigation aboard fantastic airplane-fish, in an alternation of archetypal elements, cheerfully transfigured: air, water, and earth, all engaged with the heat/fire of vegetal origin.
I believe that everyone, as a child, has played with the dandelion “puffball,” scattering its “parachutes” into the air—perhaps entrusting their flight with a wish, with a single breath, just like blowing out the candles on a birthday cake.
An action which, while following the survival strategy of that botanical species, symbolically fulfills the need to project one’s own soul pneumatically beyond the fence of destiny. A physical act that is at the same time intellectual, if not even spiritual; a “child’s game” as it is sometimes represented in alchemical treatises.
Such a game conveys an existential urgency, imagining it floating together with the “parachutes” carrying the plant’s genome; it transports an intellectual “source code” that makes the expressed wish similar to a seed, waiting for fertile soil to welcome its germination.
A game that, in nuce, concerns—indeed closely—the imagination of Misesti, who with this comic gives a fresh theoretical contribution to the development of the 8x8 Collection.
Through drawing, he practices a true exercise in intellectual survival and creates a multi-layered autobiographical narrative, combining his life experience—stretched between two cultures—with the playful language of comics.
From this are born the autobiographical adventures of the seed/idea with its “apprenticeship” of flight/navigation aboard fantastic airplane-fish, in an alternation of archetypal elements, cheerfully transfigured: air, water, and earth, all engaged with the heat/fire of vegetal origin.
