The Italian artist born in 1935 has his place in Menton’s Jean Cocteau Museum, whose exhibitions are about “presenting the multitudinous forms of creation”.
Does Valerio Adami, to whom the Jean Cocteau Museum (Séverin Wunderman collection) is presently devoting a big retrospective, feel a connection with his French host? The answer is unarguably ‘yes’. Like Cocteau throughout his life, Adami (born in Italy in 1935) is a polymorphous artist – painting, drawing, engraving, film-making – constantly throwing bridges between the arts, as those that very early on, and very durably, he established with philosophy and literature. He joined the Collège International de Philosophie that Jacques Derrida cofounded in Paris in 1983, and with Derrida he also started the European drawing foundation in 1997. Today the much-travelled artist from Bologna shares his time between Paris and the Lake Maggiore region. Adami has worked considerably for and in France, e.g. stained glass for Ivry Town Hall, a fresco for the Théâtre du Châtelet, paintings in Austerlitz Station.
A defining outline
According to Jean Cocteau,“painting is like writing” in that it intrinsically “represents” an artist. Of this Adami is the perfect illustration. “His style developed in the mid-1960s is recognisable at a glance,” the exhibition’s curator explains. “It features strong lines, always painted in black, outlining each element as if to define it. Then comes the colour in slabs of acrylic paint, very intense, saturated colour that draws on a deliberately limited palette […]; shadows are noticeably absent.” Fundamentally his oeuvre seems nourished by academic influences as much as steeped in modernity. A style we can admire through 60-odd paintings, some accompanied by their preparatory sketches, displayed through 800m² of the museum.
« Ligne(s) de vie », jusqu’au 5 novembre (sauf le mardi)
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