Valerio Adami, half-hearted ideas

More analytical and profound even than his marked and highly personal black mark. Valerio Adami is a storyteller who hybridises languages and interrogates according to lines that are inscrutable and dense at the same time, which are composed in a sinuous harmony. Sign and colour in him harness each other, the serigraphic drafting, in his typical plat coldness, of blues and greens, juxtaposes without ever blurring with yellows, ochres and reds, evoking, telling, describing and criticising. No chiaroscuro, nuances or half-tints.

"Nothing is further from the tenebrism and expressionism of Adami's large surfaces. Compact and metallic colours, yet light as if painted by means of air and light, the two great illusionists of the Western world," writes Octavio Paz in the catalogue published by Skira to accompany the exhibition at the Palazzo Reale in Milan (exhibition curated by Marco Meneguzzo, open until 22 September, admission free).

ValerioAdami, Ritratto di Walter Benjamin, 1973

Closer to Leger, Bacon and De Chirico than to Wharol and Roy Lichtenstein, stuck despite himself in the classification of pop artist, his is rather a fully European poetics, which puts the human figure at the centre and demands a conceptual decoding that is much broader than just the American perspective. Because Adami is a painter who feeds on classical myths and philosophy, very attentive to music and capable of profusing and playing with metaphors, allegories and symbols. His classicism that looks to Raphael, and that leads him to define himself as born from a rib of Urbino, in the 2009 dechirican Aeneas fleeing from Troy with his father Anchises on his shoulders, reinterprets the epic up to Hollywood destinations, while in Penthesilea, a 1994 masterpiece, the body of the beautiful queen and amazon among the remains of temples is juxtaposed to a 20th-century ambulance with sinuous lines. His portraits privilege Nietzsche, Leopardi, Wagner, Bacon, Freud, and Kokoschka, and the evocative portrait of Walter Benjamin stands out among them all. And patience if certain critics have guiltily stopped at Latrines in Times Square, acrylic on canvas of 1968. Because the early Adami is also this, he was pop but it is then the Figuration narrative that best describes him, and even when he plays with everyday objects and interiors, his eye is insolent, alert and critical, ironic and cutting.

ValerioAdami, L’incantesimo del lago, 1984

An albeit placid painting, never pacified his. In The Spell of the Lake, an acrylic from 1984, the myth is filled with enigmas, turns our heads, and questions us. And when this author's straight or sinuous lines move, split and elude us, they narrate, while personal memories mingle with myths, to become erotic as well, as in Un amore: la morte, from 1990. And it is precisely the memento mori that is a constant in his latest works, with memory becoming the only antidote to deadly dissolution.

In Adami 'there is the sublime presumption of constructing a unique linguistic cosmos, but one that does not look like a pre-linguistic magma,' explains curator Meneguzzo