A Remembrance of Franco Vaccari

Just a few days after his death, Museion wishes to remember Franco Vaccari, a task that is anything but easy. Although he developed as an artist and became known primarily through photography, the works held in the museum’s collection point to his early interest in visual poetry, or what he himself called “anonymous forms of poetry.” More precisely, they focus on the traces people leave behind: marks on streets and walls; images on passport photographs printed in the photo booths that once filled city streets; or traces left through written dreams, or through coffees drunk in a place that was at once a bar and a work of art.

As a conceptual artist, Franco Vaccari was far more than a figure of Italian photography, far more than a representative of the neo-avant-garde, and far more than a precursor to practices later described as relational art or narrative art. He was interested in people and in what they had to say. The space usually occupied by the artist, he chose instead to give to the public, to those who encountered him, knowingly or not.

In 1969, Vaccari began calling his projects Esposizioni in tempo reale, emphasizing that a trace cannot be separated from time, since it comes into being through lived experience. For Franco Vaccari, time was not an abstract idea but something real. From that moment on, the Esposizioni in tempo reale were systematically numbered. Some were later taken up again in different contexts, each time slightly changed, shaped by new circumstances and a different reality. Even when his work turned toward dreams and the oneiric, it remained rooted in real time: dreams, too, are real once they are told, written down, or shared.

The emulsion-coated canvas in Museion’s collection, part of a group of around twenty works by the artist, bears the sentence: “I swear I observed this dog roaming the streets with all the air of an authentic poem” (1967). It is not one of Vaccari’s later works, yet it brings together many of the elements that defined his practice: his close attention to everyday and provincial life, Vaccari lived his entire life in Modena and never left his city; his preference for the side path rather than the main road; his ability to find beauty through irony as well as through rigor; and his way of remaining true to himself while quietly anticipating many later artistic developments.

In one of his Esposizioni in tempo reale, the title itself captures how Franco Vaccari related to others. Whether he was engaging with an anonymous audience or with the art world made little difference to him. What mattered was a simple, generous openness, the kind of gesture that might begin with an unexpected encounter and end with an invitation: “Oh, you’re here too? Coffee.”