VALERIO ADAMI: Alice in the Land of Violence

David Nolan Gallery is pleased to present Alice in the Land of Violence, an exhibition of drawings and paintings by Valerio Adami from the 1960s, a period of great international success for the artist, whose work was highlighted at the Venice Biennale, and at Documenta III. The exhibition looks back at subjects that always fascinated Adami: homages to fellow artists, the interior life of hotel rooms and bars, his love of travel, music and literature, the world of theatre, and political thought.

Adami was born in Bologna in 1935, a city that gave rise to the Western world’s oldest university and to a legendary culinary tradition, and that also helped birth Italian cinema and industry alike – but a city also scarred by Fascist eruptions at the university and by Allied bombing that wrecked much of it during the war. His parents were musicians, and he grew up surrounded by music alongside his brother, a filmmaker who worked with Fellini and remained a lifelong collaborator. Some of Adami’s most playful works integrate this tension of beauty and upheaval.

In 1955, Adami moved to Paris, entering a milieu that would shape him indelibly: close friendships with Roberto Matta and Wifredo Lam, and a wider circle of serious writers and thinkers that included Octavio Paz, Italo Calvino, and Jacques Derrida. Matta’s deconstruction of conventional form spurred something already forming in Adami’s own mind, and like Matta, Adami turned to surrealism and imagined landscapes as a way of working. A 1962 trip to London brought him into direct contact with Graham Sutherland, Jim Dine, Francis Bacon, and William Scott, and into close conversation with Richard Hamilton, with whom he shared an interest in culture and technology. Hamilton’s collage-like layering was an approach the two artists held in common. That same London trip introduced sound into Adami’s work for the first time, as onomatopoeia borrowed from comics and the music of Bruno Maderna and Luciano Berio also began entering his work.

Around this time, Adami and his wife, the artist Camilla Cantoni, settled at Villa Cantoni on Lake Maggiore, which became a gathering place for Derrida, Édouard Glissant, Carlos Fuentes, among other artists and intellectuals, where Adami set up the atelier central to this body of work. There is a stillness in his paintings which position the viewer as a kind of voyeur, watching a scene unfold, an atmosphere that shared something with the cultural unease Alberto Moravia was writing about at the same time. The intellectual curiosity and rigor he has always brought to his work, and his insistence on freedom of ideas, make him stand out in postwar Europe and remain relevant today.

Adami’s style of the 1960s connects to American Abstract Expressionism and to French cloisonnisme — named after cloisonné, the metalworking technique in which color is separated by wire, giving painting the density and structure of Gothic stained glass, famously used by Gauguin. Flat fields of saturated color, bound by precise black outline, fragment bodies and objects and reassemble them into images that feel figurative and abstract at the same time. The resemblance to Pop Art’s thick lines and unshaded color — the vocabulary Roy Lichtenstein and, later, Peter Saul each drew from comic books in their own ways — has led some to place Adami within that movement. He rejected the comparison outright. “I always vigorously refused the appellation of pop,” he told Carlos Franqui, a Cuban poet, journalist, prominent revolutionary, and a friend of Adami’s, insisting instead on a practice rooted in literature, psychoanalysis, and philosophical inquiry — what is now known as “Narrative Figuration.” Poetry and balance are ever-present in his works. The directness and simplicity of his paintings give the viewer unobstructed access to sensation, and open as many interpretations as there are viewers.

Coming of age in postwar Italy also sharpened Adami’s suspicion of power and his conviction that freedom of thought was essential to art, a conviction that found its fullest expression in his major work Intolerance. This visual language was built on early training in Felice Carena’s atelier, a formative encounter with Oskar Kokoschka in Venice, and formal study under Achille Funi at Milan’s Accademia di Brera. Blam (1962), subdued and near-abstract, marks this early period; and in Auto-Lavaggio (1967), we see how the blues and purples of his mature palette fully arrive.

The hotel room recurs throughout Adami’s work as a site of psychological tension — a studio of convenience for a nomadic artist, but also a space thick with memory and isolation, assembled poetically. “For years, I painted in hotel rooms,” he recalled. “I needed the anonymity of a place of passage to reinvent the possibility of a studio.” His interiors hold anonymous, fragmented figures, their stories energized by a second presence or a suggestive title — a rawness typical of his 1960s style, in which disparate cultural artifacts are thrown together. Adami’s interest in psychoanalysis, and in how mechanical objects shape desire, extended to these rooms as spaces of isolation and detachment. In the mid-1960s Adami made his first trip to New York, staying at the Chelsea Hotel and befriending Allen Ginsberg and Saul Steinberg; it was the city’s underground scene — its writers, poets, and musicians, and not its Pop scene — that drew him in.

Cars run as a parallel theme through the decade. An avid enthusiast who enrolled in Pietro Taruffi’s high-speed driving school in 1963, Adami included automobile imagery into his paintings and drawings, often naming works to evoke the sound of an engine. The car became a symbol of freedom and detachment, of fragmented identity and mechanical sexuality.

Drawing has remained central to Adami’s practice throughout, whether in his exquisite, sophisticated graphite works on paper or in the way line structures his paintings — a strong compositional element that carves the picture plane into fields of positive and negative space. His drawings unfold like a stream of consciousness, memories flowing across the sheet with something of James Joyce’s collage-like sense of accumulation. As Adami has put it: “Line is a manifestation of thought.”

In the decades since, Adami has extended this sensibility into murals and large-scale public works made for community rather than gallery or museum, realized all over the world from Paris to Tokyo. His high-low sensibility and surrealist inheritance can be seen today in artists from William Copley to Carroll Dunham, KAWS, and Peter Saul.