Alice in the Land of Violence at David Nolan Gallery gathers paintings and drawings by Valerio Adami from the 1960s when the artist, then in his late twenties and early thirties, was developing the delineated, fragmented figuration that would become his signature. As with many postwar European artists and movements of significance that do not fit the narrative of American postwar modernism, Adami (b. 1935, Bologna) is little known in the United States. He is perhaps best known here through Jacques Derrida’s long 1975 essay devoted to his drawings, “+R (Into the Bargain).”
Simply put, Adami is a figurative artist whose work acknowledges that all representation is an abstraction. His best-known works consist of fragmented bodies and objects reduced to flat planes of color and separated by thick black lines, producing a graphic, poster-like effect. These lines do not merely outline shapes: they dissect, analyze, and construct a discontinuous reality. The effect is one of intellectual and perceptual cartography—a mapping of a world that no longer holds together, that cannot be held together, that verges on becoming illegible.
The earliest works in this exhibition begin in a stylistically self-aware, expressionist idiom which, following his 1955 encounter with Roberto Matta in Paris, was soon inflected by Surrealism. The Expressionism persists not as a stable style, but as a residue, an unstable force within figures and spaces that are losing their volumetric and narrative coherence. The paintings remain emotionally charged and invested with this somewhat studied psychic intensity, even as Adami moves toward the discontinuous image-world and graphic economy of his later painting.
Much of the work in this exhibition came into being within a postwar interval in which the old world had not yet disappeared and the new had not yet established its terms. Adami’s work builds upon disordered aggregates: symbols of freedom and detachment, mechanized desire and sexuality, the fluidity of identity in an age in which everything is being disembodied. The detritus of war and of the Fascist order it destroyed is displaced into the images of the new one; fragments persist after the structures that once gave them coherence have disappeared. What required reconstruction was not simply the psychic events to which these works refer, but the conditions under which such fragments could appear as a world. Today, when much contemporary work turns to comparable themes, Adami’s re-introduction brings that unresolved interval back into view.
Adami’s palette is often discordant; his colors function psychologically rather than in a mimetic register. They signal that the image is neither window nor mirror but symptom—a logic that moves the work away from Pop, even where its graphic character might suggest otherwise. Though there are superficial correspondences with Pop, Adami “vigorously refused the appellation of Pop,” insisting instead on a practice rooted in literature, psychoanalysis, and philosophical inquiry.
The point is not that commercial culture is absent from his work, but that it is submitted to these frames rather than a privileged subject; philosophy becomes a persistent framing device through which the image deconstructs rather than simply depicts. The relevant context is Narrative Figuration, a heterogeneous, Paris-centered formation that developed during the 1960s and into the ’70s. Its relation to Anglo-American Pop was not simply oppositional—it offered another way to return to figuration, mass culture, and contemporary history without accepting the transparency of Pop’s image-world.
Like his sources, Adami’s subjects are unstable, hovering between the abstract and the figurative, which makes a narrative reading of his work an act of divination. Here Adami makes manifest the interval, the gap between language and figure. The “violence” of the exhibition’s title may refer to the violence done in making images cohere, forcing the viewer not only to derive meaning, but to reconstruct the image to be interpreted. In this sense, Adami’s painting is not a representation of thought, but an enactment of it: a staging of the conditions under which thought is possible in an age of image saturation. Its unity—if it has one—emerges from the coexistence of heterogeneous events rather than from their absorption into a unified field.
The exhibition’s title, taken from a 1963 painting, evokes a journey into a strange and threatening world in which wonder has been displaced by violence. The works do not illustrate the political events of the decade so much as register the instability through which such events became perceptible as symptoms of a larger disorder: Italy was riven by political conflict, the Vietnam War was escalating, and the Cold War had divided the world into opposing camps.
Adami’s surreal, cartoon-like figures inhabit the discontinuous, in which disparate events acquire a disturbing coherence—not because they belong to a single narrative, but because they occupy the same space. Adami does not paint events. He paints what it feels like psychically to inhabit a world in which the violent police suppression of a Communist rally in Bologna in May 1960 comes to resonate internationally through the decade.
Assuming the position of an Alice-like figure navigating a world externally discontinuous and internally subject to constant rupture, Adami’s paintings re-stage this chaos. Through the structure of his deformed imagery, he makes visible the fracture of modernity. His lines do not enclose; they fracture. His colors do not soothe or describe; their dissonance is descriptive. His collage-like forms, centrally presented against a flat, stage-like backdrop, appear to hover between figuration and composition. It is here that Adami’s theater emerges in the interval between what is seen and what is felt, between figure and ground, between the classical and the modern, between tableau and field.
These are not stable positions but passages between determinations that refuse to settle into one another. The performance of meaning is never quite completed. In its suspension, in its refusal to close, lies the peculiar power of Adami’s work. This is not nihilism. It is a kind of faith: the faith that the image, even ruptured, can still establish a relation between the self and a world that has become illegible. His images arrive at their destinations, though what they are of remains—legibly illegible.
