CACTUS is a book that blends botanical rigor with artistic imagination, published by marinonibooks, an independent italian publishing house founded in 2020 and known for its «libri con le figure» (“books with pictures”), a series of interdisciplinary projects where form and content interact closely. In this volume as well, editorial care and visual research stand out, turning each page into an object of contemplation. The volume is also part of Manìe, the marinonibooks series dedicated to small-format, visually driven explorations of personal fixations and the poetic potential of cataloguing.

The book pairs Alicia Baladan’s illustrations with a text by Marc Jeanson, an internationally renowned botanist. Jeanson opens with a striking observation: cutting cactus stems into thin cross-sections reveals a “starry sky,” where the internal structures display mutable symmetries, elongated branches, and surprising geometries. It is an invitation to read nature as an archive of forms, almost a poetic atlas of living matter.

Baladan, in turn, recounts her discovery of cacti through an unexpected encounter: an “irregular” specimen, awkward and full of twists, that breaks the stereotypical image of the perfectly symmetrical plant. Drawing it proves impossible, the real form escapes representation, pushing the artist to invent variations, imaginary relatives, new yet believable botanical creatures. The process becomes an alchemical game with ink and water, generating shapes that resemble other succulents, in a continuous exchange between reality and metamorphosis.

The book’s compact 12 × 16.5 cm format invites intimate reading. The graphic design by studio òbelo builds a careful balance of empty spaces, textures, and lines, allowing the images to breathe and letting the words of Jeanson and Baladan resonate without excess. The thread-sewn binding and soft cover confirm marinonibooks’ attention to the physicality of books: not just as containers of content, but as sensory objects.

CACTUS is a small treatise on wonder: a celebration of the biodiversity of succulent plants and, at the same time, an exploration of the relationship between scientific observation and artistic interpretation. It is a book that trains the gaze, encouraging the reader to discover the unexpected within the familiar and to recognize, in the most unusual forms of nature, an inexhaustible source of invention.