L'obra sonorous mutant de Vacca

Vicenç Vacca is an artist who belongs to El meridià de Granollers, a title with which Alexandre Cirici greeted with an article in Serra d'Or the arrival of fresh air at the Mostra d'Art Jove de Granollers in 1971. Granollers is the city where Vacca was born in 1954 and has given some of the most interesting artists of recent generations, such as Jordi Benito and Vicenç Viaplana. It is a city that experienced the I Festival of Progressive Music in 1971, an event expelled on the outskirts of Franco's Barcelona with Pau Riba and his Dioptria at the helm, with unusual characters such as Joan Illa Morell, known as JIM, animator of the youth of that time and who lived one of the most bizarre happenings of Salvador Dalí, with Arranz-Bravo and Bartolozzi of troupes.

Vacca presents Tecla Sala with an anthology of 15 of its sound installations, from 1986 to the present. An artist who is linked to a family of jazz musicians and rooted in the world of sound. But Vacca is not a musical artist, but uses sound as a sculptural material that needs space to breathe and as a spur to provoke the viewer and / or listener. One of the works tells us directly about this grafted self-portrait of the family: How high the moon (1995), in homage to his father, athlete and jazz musician. The play shows an inverted medal won by the father that appears as a moon in a desert landscape.

Vacca's work is a hybrid and heterodox work, which captures the attention in an object-oriented nucleus that allows it to formulate a critical proposal or a space of sensitive perception, which invites the participation of the spectator, as in the Retard (2021), which records the words spoken to him and returns them as a sound and as a reminder. The emission of sounds against the objects you choose is another of the characteristic features of this author.

The object has a Dadaist point of view: a head, shoes, cables or elements linked to sound technologies or simple reproductions of images such as Turner's painting in Zero Copy (2014). The opening of this anthology is Literatura universal (1986), a video that records the industrial press of a car full of books and its result, a work from the mid-eighties, in the midst of the outbreak of the post-Franco rebellion which pointed to the emerging generation of that time.

The destruction of the past has here echoes of new realism, of accumulation and destruction of consumer objects. The sound installations on display exude interest in reproduction systems, communication, interactivity, serialization, media mixing, randomness, and the use of signs and words. We would say that it is a work that seeks to make the work an event of the present. It is not just an exercise in sound, but the search for a present tense, a work that feels like reproduction in flight, because it wants to make reproduction an original, because it moves back and forth, because it makes a forward pressing a backward. The work has a point of loop, constant return and updating and closes with the creation of an interactive mobile sound art app in Grand Hall Lament (2013).

There are no labels to define the mutant sound work of Vicenç Vacca, who finds in the title of this exhibition the best track, as always, with a negation: Out of nowhere.