Antonio Addamiano

Dep Art Gallery is pleased to announce the exhibition "Valerio Adami. Rethinking Reality," curated by Lorenzo Madaro, which will be on view until May 17. The exhibition features works created between the 1970s and the 2000s, alternating scenes of travel and paintings where the artist engages in the act of rethinking the reality he has experienced, as seen in the impressive painting "Mnemosine machine à écrire et violon" from 1987.

Curator Lorenzo Madaro describes the artist with the following words: "Erudite, ironic, sophisticated, the long and complex work of Valerio Adami has reiterated that at the heart of all his visual interest there is a persistent rethinking of reality in all its philosophical, cultural, metaphysical aspects, but also ironic ones and those that seem apparently banal and quotidian.

Adami's research is indeed like a vast archive where fragments of the real meet and intertwine in surprising places, roles, and visions, on one hand intimately connected to a realm of concreteness, a physical space that belongs to painting and drawing; on the other hand, to a dreamlike dimension where bold juxtapositions—of meaning and also of symbols—offer new interpretations to explore the boundaries between these interstitial spaces of what is tangible and what is tied to the imagination.

Sign, writing, and color are the three paradigms around which each work is constructed during the decades considered in this exhibition starting from the 1970s, confirming his specific orientations and, above all, his prominent role in the history of Italian and international painting during the second half of the 20th century.

At a time dominated by the two-dimensionality of the consumer icon, not only in America but elsewhere, and by the obsessive use of images from the advertising world or the more popular and commonly used history of art, Adami in Italy (and then in his long travels as the intellectual nomad he has always been) inventively carved a path for painting to address the real without stumbling into neorealist rhetoric or the obsessive pursuit of banality at all costs.

In the absence of pictorial nuances and thus through a refined technique that favors dense and flat fields, and a palette that changes while remaining faithful to itself since his most accomplished beginnings, there is a new iconography that must be deciphered each time, as it is the result of layering, references, and obsessive uses of certain locations where everything coexists, the high and the low, mythology and an embrace, architecture and the great theme of the painting within the painting, music and a radiator. Therefore, this exhibition is a journey through the infinite worlds of Adami, rhythmed by his unmistakable style that is both drawing and thought together.
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