ART CITES:Brussels-Valerio Adami
Valerio Adami is recognized internationally as an important European artist. They may look like comic book art, but there is a perturbing sadness to the world that Valerio Adami creates in his large-scale painting. His work can separated in three major periods. In his early Pop-related works, he offers us views of isolated fragments of modern society in which objects are taken out of perspective and context to allow us to see them anew. They were succeeded by a number of works focusing on historic moments and presentations of heroes of modern culture. The works of his most recent period are perhaps his most interesting and attractive.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Galerie Daniel Templon Archive
“New Work”, Valerio Adami’s solo exhibition at Galerie Daniel Templon in Brussels invites visitors on a journey around his recent works, marked by the familiar elegance of the artist-philosopher’s approach. The artist puts together complex allegories in compositions that feature his favourite themes: travel, music, literature and theatre. Despite the sparkling colours that light up the canvases, the figures who populate them often seem to be prey to introspection and melancholy. Valerio Adami was born in Bologna and developed an interest for drawing and painting at an early age. In 1951, at the age of 16, he was accepted into the Accademia di Brera in Milan, under the tutelage of the Achille Funi. His teacher’s struggle between the old and the new may have influenced Adami’s rejection of Abstract Expressionism in favor of a figurative style with Abstract elements, which has remained his trademark for the past 40 years. It is decidedly the struggle between modernity and antiquity, and it remains pronounced throughout his work. Adami began to address politics in his art, and incorporated subject matter such as modern European history, literature, philosophy, and mythology. Adami’s artworks were expressionistic, but around the time of his second exhibition in 1964 at Kassel, he had developed a style of painting reminiscent of French cloisonnism, featuring regions of flat color bordered by black lines. The artist subjects were highly stylized and often presented in fragments. He has adopted his own visual language with color that is both unsettling and thought-provoking. While the American Pop artists chose cheerful color palettes, Adami has chosen the colors of war as the foundation for much of his work. His canvases contain blocks of camouflage colors of war and strife. Shades of putrid green are often accented with blocks of and deep reds. While the American artists embraced the sheer commercialization of art as a rebellion against the intellectual elitism of the Abstract Expressionists, Adami, like many of his Europeans counterparts, goes deeper. On the surface his work seems childlike, his figures robotic, but this simplicity is what drives the work’s complexity. To a certain degree, Adami’s work is artistic journalism and he has remarked, “Analytical drawing and figuration are forms of thought, the challenges to seeing, that new pedagogy for the education of our eyes”.
Info: Galerie Daniel Templon, 13 A rue Veydt, Bruxelles, Duration 3/11-23/12/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-18:00, www.danieltemplon.com
