They may look like comic book art, but there is a perturbing sadness to the world that Valerio Adami creates in his large-scale paintings, 23 of which are currently on view until Jan. 9 at the Boca Raton Museum of Art in a retrospective exhibit that spans four decades of the Italian artist’s work.
The exhibit is merely a glimpse into Adami’s vast oeuvre, which has been shaped by global travel and friendships with some of the world’s most notable cultural icons. Adami’s work tells a visual story, allowing him to infuse social commentary in paintings that portray global hotspots such as Israel, India, Cuba, and the post-World War II Europe that seems the underlying theme to most of his work. Each painting is a visual storybook.
“Adami sees around him, in the real world, the world of his visions, a world of metaphors, those evocations from depiction that are replete with ideas beyond depiction,” writes George S. Bolge, the Boca Museum’s executive director. “He assumes all objects are inherently allegorical; ‘moderated’ by him, they become more intensely so.”
Adami was born in 1935 in Bologna, Italy. As a young man, he spent his summer vacations in Venice, where his ideology as an artist was shaped by meetings with prominent artistic figures, including W.H. Auden and Oscar Kokoschka. He went on to study art at the Academia di Brera, first as a draughtsman, but by 1954, he was studying under the tutelage of the then-renowned figurative painter Achille Funi.
Funi’s influences had included Boccioni and the Futurists, whom he later rejected, finally settling on a style influenced heavily by Renaissance masters. Funi’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 betwixt modernity and antiquity, and it remains pronounced throughout his work.
It’s clear that Adami’s initial training with drawing dramatically influenced his painting, which includes sharp lines as significant feature. These lines are part of his deconstruction of the human form to what is essential to capture a moment and evoke a mood. Each painting begins with a study and he has said, “I look only for the anatomies and the virtue of the profile, the point of the pencil becomes the lamp that illuminates the path in the dark.”
By 1955 Adami was working in Paris where he became part of the Nouvelle Figuration movement — often described as the French intellectualized version of pop art. However, there were vast differences in the influences and ideologies of American and European artists at that time. The visual imagery in Adami’s style, and his use of color is, in fact, remarkably similar to the Action Comics of the 1930s, which introduced the Superman character. But the use of a commercialized, glossy surface, unlike American pop art, is a tool to draw the viewer into a world of introspection and allegory, and not just a commentary on materialism.
In Adami’s hyperreal world, women are eroticized, but not romanticized. They are fully present, but menacing. For example, in Metamorfosi (1982), Adami depicts Ovid’s myth of Actaeon, a hunter who has stumbled upon Diana and her nymphs bathing. Diana, irritated that he has seen her nude, transforms him into a deer. His dogs subsequently chase him down, kill him, and eat him. In Adami’s painting, Actaeon is trying to embrace Diana. She appears to be kissing him farewell as he morphs into a deer.
In Capriccio (1983), a sturdy female figure is poised to play the violin – an instrument that appears multiple times throughout many of Adami’s paintings. As a capriccio is usually a lively, short musical composition, the message is unclear. The woman has a striking profile, her stance is elegant, her bosom is attractive. However, her legs are oversized and unappealing – they seem far too large for her body and this distortion, along with a skeletal arm and a heavily lined face, make her too harsh for feminine appeal.
Overall, Adami’s women are powerful, albeit indelicate. In La Nuvola, (1991), a woman is poised coquettishly above a man who appears either spent, or perhaps dead? Though we can’t see the woman’s face, her body language seems triumphant. She seems unconcerned about the man. The two figures appear to be floating amidst the clouds (nuvola translates as cloud). A lone figure in the background rests upon a shovel, perhaps watching the two.
The female figure in La Notte dello Stambecco (1988) again appears triumphant and larger than life. She holds books and a canvas – perhaps Adami’s sketchbooks and painting? She is depicted in the evening sky and the figure of a goat is upside down beneath her. The woman’s face is skeletal, empty, and morose. Though she seems to hold important tools of the artist’s trade, she take no pleasure in these possessions.
Adami has adopted his own visual language with color that is both unsettling and thought-provoking. While the American pop artists, like Warhol and Lichtenstein, 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 assaultive yellows and deep, sanguine reds. Adami’s world does lure you with its charm, but rather its symbolism, which invites analysis and demands further contemplation.
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.”
In Quadri nel Paesaggio (Pictures in the Landscape) (2008), Adami paints himself — identifiable by his signature round glasses— inhabiting a grayscale world. His foot is stuck to something and he points to a picture of a simmering volcano. But in front of him is a color painting that depicts crops and the hazardous figure of a locust. A self-commentary within the broader context of the nation of Italy and the ongoing struggle to maintain antiquity, it also tries to embrace a new modernity.
And that is Adami’s sheer genius, his ability to be both observer and participant: “I become a spectator and a protagonist: then in my unconscious other associations move.” Like his audience, Adami is observer, but also narrator.
Within his art, he makes available his dialogue with the world-at-large, and we are invited to participate. As he has said, “The important thing is not to develop new possibilities of vision, but to clarify and organize the reality in which we live into a representation, to make it available.”
Valerio Adami is on view at the Boca Raton Museum of Art until Jan. 9. Hours for this exhibition are Tuesday through Friday from 10 a.m. until 6 p.m., Wednesday from 10 a.m. until 9 p.m., and Saturday and Sunday from noon until 6 p.m. Admission is $8 for adults, $6 for seniors, and $4 for students. For more information call 561-392-2500, or visit www.bocamuseum.org.
Jenifer Mangione Vogt is a marketing communications professional and resident of Boca Raton. She’s been enamored with painting for most of her life. She studied art history and received her B.A. from Purchase College.