Eyes wide-open, challenging our increasingly bland, flattened, and frenetic reality, Franco Vaccari transforms the spaces of P420 into a “cavern of memory” populated by his own dreams. Entering, viewers discover his visions one by one. In the dark gallery, lights turns on as one approaches the individual works, revealing fragmented images charged with emotion.

“Migrazione del reale” (Exodus of the Real) largely consists of photographs of notebooks in which the artist has recorded his dreams every morning since the early 1980s. Placing them at a remove and further reworking them, as if trying to remember a dream, Vaccari prints the photos on canvas and retouches them by hand with colored pencils, heightening or manipulating their original designs. In one, we see a disconsolate gray figure walking in front of a Futurist-looking painting of Mickey Mouse (Sogno del 3-4-1982 [Dream of 4/3/1982], all works mentioned 2017); in another, the artist’s wild calligraphy appears alongside a nervous drawing of a gigantic rooster (Sogno del 2-60-1983 [Dream of 6/2/1983]); and in yet another, we confront the hyper-realistic face of a woman beside a blue Mediterranean sea (Sogno del 4/11/1985 [Dream of 11/4/1985]).

Vaccari is not interested in the fantastical or psychoanalytical dimensions of his dreams; it is pointless to interpret the notebooks and their illustrations narratively. Further confounding fact and fiction, these objects have been photographed lying open on a table in a Caravaggesque light that gives them a dramatic three-dimensional presence. Each canvas marks a solitary, fleeting encounter which requires an authentic commitment to adventure and discovery.

Translated from Italian by Marguerite Shore.

— Veronica Santi