Valerio Adami Returns to New York After 20 Years, Still Sharp at 91

By Daniel Okafor

Valerio Adami hasn't shown in New York for more than 20 years. His comeback, Alice in the Land of Violence at David Nolan Gallery, also cuts the ribbon on the gallery's new, roomier Tribeca space. The artist, born in Bologna in 1935, is 91.

That's the quiet scandal here. Adami is not as well known in America as Giorgio Morandi, Alberto Burri, or Francesco Clemente — but he should be, as the exhibition's premise bluntly argues. Thirty-one works hang on the new walls: 16 paintings and 15 drawings. All but one date from 1962 to 1967. The exception is "Hotel Pulitzer," completed this year, and it shows no loss of acuity. Ninety-one and still painting with edge. Some retirement.

What was Adami doing in the '60s?

Plenty, and everywhere. After graduating from art school in Milan, he moved to Paris in 1955 and met Roberto Matta and Wifredo Lam. By the late '50s he was commuting between London, New York, South America, and India, collecting friends the way others collect stamps: Richard Hamilton, Jim Dine, Oskar Kokoschka, Jacques Derrida, Édouard Glissant, Octavio Paz.

The show concentrates on work made during a turbulent stretch when art was shifting globally. Adami's paintings from the period have been tagged as Pop Art — flat, saturated color, hard black outlines — but the label fits like a borrowed coat.

Why the Pop label doesn't stick

Adami's actual menu of influences runs wider:

• Surrealism: Matta's fragmented machinery and fantastical architecture; Lam's hybrids of animal and human
• Expressionism: the distorted bodies of Francis Bacon and Kokoschka
• Pop Art: those flat colors and black outlines, admittedly

Rather than drowning in this mix, the young Adami absorbed and transformed it into something all his own — a syncretic approach (blending diverse sources into one voice) that marks his early career. The contrast with his American counterparts is telling. Where Pop loved onomatopoeia — think "Blam," the title of his 1962 acrylic — Adami's paintings fill with ambiguous shapes and words that resist any reductive reading.

The earliest work here, fittingly, is "Auto-lavaggio (Car Wash)" (1964), pencil, watercolor and tempera on paper — a domestic machine rendered like a small theater. "Blam" (1962) delivers the hot color; the drawings run cooler. Hence the temperature of his art: hot palette, cold outline, no comfort in between.

Whether "Hotel Pulitzer" signals more American exposure for Adami remains the open question. A 91-year-old reintroducing himself to New York after two decades — that's a wager on attention, and the paintings are worth the bet.