Francesco Bonami

he book COLORS aims to explore the best of visual and textual material of the 90 issues of the magazine, created by the photographer Oliviero Toscani and the art director Tibor Kalman in 1991. The content is presented transversely through a subdivision in ten macro-themes which highlight the "Tumblr ante litteram" nature of the magazine. Twenty-five years of images and texts are shaken and served using ingredients from different issues. The idea is to tell COLORS by using its own words, in a visionary journey through time, between irony and semiotics, rereading the analysis of the world carried out by the magazine, acknowledging its high research value. Among the objectives: - celebrating and narrating COLORS in a non-direct and linear way. - not providing an axiomatic volume or making it a monument, but rather making it a subject still alive and able to talk about today's world through the work carried out on the world back then.- producing an object attractive to both the collectors and those who do not know the magazine at all, trying to intrigue those who may have only a few numbers, those who believed it was no longer published and the most faithful readers. The project becomes the clarification of the exhibit of the "rest of world" made by COLORS over the years. The themes are: - BANG! (bang, bang, bang!) weapons, violence, lust, shock; - I WANT TO BELIEVE (oh my God, it's Sunday! - Time to wake up and smell the regret) everything relating to Sunday, faith, cults, national sport, what we worship; - PLACES (People write songs about places like you - You have ruined my life) places, countries, cities, and the rooms where things happen; - THAT'S AMORE (more amore) heart, physical love, the good despite everything - DRINKING BUDDIES (did somebody say "proprioception"?) portraits of people with stories to tell, human cases, superheroes; - ELVIS (the Good, the Bad and the Elvis) fame, excess, degeneration, disguise, kitsch. - WHERE THE HELL IS MY TAIL? ("Tienes hair muy bonito!" "Quien, yo?") the animal world, with hair, tails and everything else, missing links (?) included; - COLORS IS THE NEW BLACK the essence of COLORS through the use of colors, all the colors of its themes; - FUTURE IS TEN MINUTES AWAY (I wanted to be an architect but my parents said the) the future, predictions about the future and how we get ready for it. A tribute to COLORS # 13 ends off the volume: it is the issue where Tibor Kalman narrated without the use of words.