VALERIO ADAMI

Through 28 works that retrace the main phases of the artist’s career from 1970 to the present, this retrospective documents the vitality of the visual search carried out by a leading figure of Italian and European art.

The exhibition includes a selection of works belonging to different stages of Valerio Adami’s research, who has been active since the late Fifties within that wide artistic trend called New Figuration (Nouvelle Figuration) which, on the ashes of Informal Art, developed in England and in the United States, and then spread all over Europe assuming different and sometimes even contradictory forms and outcomes.

The international scene of those years can be found in the experiences of Adami himself, who was born in 1935 in Bologna and now lives between Paris, his city of choice, and Lake Maggiore. Graduated from the Accademia di Brera in 1955 and then traveling through Europe, the United States, Latin America and India, Adami combines these influences with a fascination for the painting of Oskar Kokoschka and Francis Bacon, Surrealism and Giorgio De Chirico, drawing on the British and American pop wave and soon developing an original synthetic and fragmented figuration, played on flat blocks of color defined by a sharp sign-drawing.

In this way Adami “cuts out” sharp black outlines without chiaroscuro and, like a film editor, puts words and initials into the work. According to philosopher Jacques Derrida’s definition of Valerio Adami’s art: “a journey of drawing” presides over the artist’s work, characterised by that typical outburst of thought into image, of word into drawing, and vice versa.

The title of the exhibition, Immagine e pensiero (Image and thought), refers to this openness to contamination between mental processes and the unconscious, with images of daily life and of high and low culture, through film and photographic procedures. This can be seen in the works exhibited, in the letters and words drifting on canvas, in the dilated images, in the iconic marks, in transfers and repetitions. Adami’s integrity of rigor has turned the fertile dispersion of his language into an essential moment of international art.