ART CITIES: Paris-Valerio Adami

Born in 1935 in Bologna, Valerio Adami is a leading figure in the Narrative Figuration movement. His acrylic paintings are characterised by blocks of colour outlined in black evoking the themes of travel, music, literature and theatre. The notion of mystery is expressed in the many literary references that populate the paintings, a notion that always plays a central role in his work, which he defines as a philosophical questioning.

By Efi MIchalarou
Photo: Galerie Templon Archive

At 87, Valerio Adami is unveiling a new series of introspective and poignant canvases, the result of over two years of work. The exhibition plunges visitors into the artist’s striking universe, a world of vivid colors, yet more thoughtful than ever, haunted by the artist-philosopher’s elegant hand-writing. Although long associated with Narrative Figuration, here Valerio Adami evokes the neo-classical drawing tradition, returning to his roots when he studied at the Accademia di belle arti di Brera a Milano. He created most of the dozen previously unseen new works in his Montmartre studio. They feature complex compositions where his famous wavy black line encircles and dissects each shape as the nomadic artist continues to explore his favourite themes: travel, music, literature and theatre. While some pieces have autobiographical touches or suggest vignettes from daily life, others pay explicit tribute to figures he admires, such as a work dedicated to the great poet Walt Whitman and another to Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Now more than ever, Valerio Adami defines his practices as a “philosophical questioning of the verb.” Enigmatic and accomplished, his painting defies the laws of perspective by multiplying planes and vanishing lines. The bright, unusual colours contrast with the apparent melancholy of the characters who populate his work. The painter seeks to use these distortions to give rise to new meanings.

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”.

Photo left: Valerio Adami, Cane e padrone, 2022, Acrylic on canvas, 162 × 130 cm, 63 6/8 × 51 1/8 in., © Valerio Adami, Courtesy the artist and Galerie Templon. Right: Valerio Adami, Nel cerchio, nascita e morte, 2021, Acrylic on canvas, 162 × 130 cm, 63 6/8 × 51 1/8 in., © Valerio Adami, Courtesy the artist and Galerie Templon

Info: Galerie Templon, 30 Rue Beaubourg, Paris, France, Duration: 14/5-22/7/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-19:00, www.templon.com/