Page 64 - Studio Interantional - May 1967

ROME upon, an image drawn from a copy of Time. covering or the blue water of a swimming pool
may invade a part of the body. Things of similar
Just as Freud became a critical cliche for dealing
with the Surrealists, the media analysts are rapidly emotional valence are either coloured similarly or
commentary by Henry Martin
becoming a critical cliché for the art of today. We made into integral parts of a single object.
are constantly told that the most important fact in It is the very coldness of Adami's work that gives
our lives is a matter of the way in which our minds it impact. Even though he deals with situations
are changed by new information, by new kinds of and subjects of considerable psychic force, highly
information transmission. We are supposedly being charged with the things most intimate for him, this
Minority report: made sensitive to various experiences and insensitive force exists on the canvas as something that a
viewer can see but not experience. The canvases
to others. Adami's work seems designed to show us
how to take these notions with a liberal grain of make no attempt to communicate emotion; they
The paintings of salt. Adami conceives of the mind as something a simply use it to make dispassionate descriptions of
good deal less malleable and plastic. Evidences of the way various experiences settle down into the
Valerio Adami the new culture, the 'popular' culture, are to be mind. There is no emotion in these paintings that
found in his work (his debt to the comic strip has has not already been dealt with. No conflict has
often been remarked upon), but they never have been left unresolved; all emotional tensions have
the appearance of being taken at face value. The come to a stable state of equilibrium. Adami's
For Valerio Adami the eye is less important than image, after all, is less important than the way in process is all a matter of integrating and organiz-
consciousness, consciousness less important than which it is treated, and Adami never makes any ing the various parts of experience into a coherent
memory. He gives us the world not as he sees it, attempt to treat his images in any way that is not whole and he presents us with only the projection
nor indeed as he would like it to be. His re- entirely personal. He never deals with the image of the final state of things after the process itself
elaboration of experience takes place at the level in terms of the graphic and iconographic conven- has come to a halt. As Jouffroy has pointed out,
of an almost surrealist automatism. He gives us tions of the image's source. He may take an image Adami's paintings, like most avant-garde painting
the world as he remembers it—after it has been from an advertisement, but he doesn't reproduce of the last few years, exist in the past tense in
coloured and complicated by private networks of it in the style of an advertisement. He tells us that relation to the moment of their conception and
free association, and distorted by personal habits of what we see is not necessarily what we feel, that the creation.
thought and idiosyncratic modes of feeling. These mind and its baggage condition what we perceive There is an analogy between Adami's mental
paintings are both as limpid and as secretive as as much, if not more, than what we perceive condi- operation and the actual physical operation that
graffiti on bathroom walls, the various signs, figures tions the mind. For Adami, an image is accepted he performs in making his pictures. Each of the
and articulations not to be interpreted, but simply as worth investigation only after it has incorpor- paintings begins as a drawing. Having selected a
to be taken for what they are. The forms are clear, ated itself into the fabric of his memory and proved theme, Adami elaborates it with pencil and paper,
but the necessity for the forms remains hidden. itself capable of exerting the kinds of pressures that adding and subtracting parts and associations as
This is a breast, this is a toilet-bowl, this is a finger, are exerted by sexual and other atavistic forces they come to his mind, liberally erasing, re-
this is a dotted line. But why should the finger residing there. He uses the proven emotional drawing and re-elaborating until the whole has
penetrate the breast? Why should the dotted line charge of remembered images as a touchstone for assumed the aspect of a complete and self-sufficient
(or the 'x', or any of the stray lines that make their assessing the importance of new images. narrative—a chapter in his biography. The draw-
appearance) be there at all ? These are questions Adami's debt to Cubism at the level of form is just ing is then put into an opaque projector and
that might be of interest to a psychologist, but for as clear as his debt to Surrealism at the level of thrown upon a canvas. It is then faithfully re-
the purposes of the paintings they remain un- procedures. The image is first of all self-consciously traced, with only the slightest of variations being
answered and unanswerable. The finger penetrates flat, and the image is likewise an amalgam of made. Only afterwards is the paint applied,
the breast because this is the way that Adami's several images or a conglomeration of several coldly and abstractly, according to a previously
imagination conceives of them; the dotted line or different view-points of the same image. But decided scheme. The colours are always perfectly
the arbitrary 'x' is simply a welter or a scar left on whereas Cubism was concerned with a purely flat and perfectly uniform.
the painting because it exists in the mind. This aesthetic notion of an alternative perspective, or The viewer's mind does not need to be similarly
line is wavy rather than dotted or straight because at best with the distortion of the images for ex- conditioned to understand and appreciate these
the wavy line has a particular psychological rever- pressionistic purposes, Adami's conglomerations minority reports on the state of Adami's mind. The
beration that Adami finds appropriate to this and distortions correspond to his conception of the configuration of the canvas is accidental and secon-
particular point or this particular context. configurations of the way in which the mind func- dary to the process Adami performs in creating it.
Adami draws his images from the most disparate tions. As Emilio Tadini has pointed out, Adami The canvas exists only as testimony to the all-
sources. Anything can be his subject matter. What never conceives of the image as an isolated inclusiveness of the techniques of investigation, and
interests him is the lay of the terrain of his own phenomenon—simply as part of a complex of their capacity to deal with the world. q
consciousness. Anything that has been admitted images that cohere for reasons of their own. Since
into the consciousness is liable to find its way out the images are classified in terms of the emotional Adami's paintings are on display this May, at the Galleria
of the consciousness and on to the painting. All energy which they acquire in the consciousness, it L'Attico, Rome.
the mind's flotsam finds its way on to the canvas as is only natural for images similarly charged to find
jetsam. Adami restricts himself neither to a pre- themselves in one another's company. Similarly,
conceived 'painterly' notion of the appropriate the memory of a part of an image is necessarily
image nor indeed to any preconceived 'cultural' connected to the memory of other aspects of the Facing page
Top left Valerio Adami The Swimming Pool 1966
notion of the appropriate image. He draws freely same image, thus necessitating the simultaneous
Enamel paints on canvas, 51+ x 38+ in.
upon all of the images that form a part of his daily depiction of both. The grouping and interpenetra-
Galleria L'Attico, Rome
visual and emotional biography—hotel rooms that tion of the images is a function of the same
he has lived in, the chair in which he reads the principle that determines their colouration. Colour Top right Lavatory 1966
morning paper, women's legs, breasts and lips, an in Adami's paintings, even though it takes account Enamel paints on canvas, 31⅞ x 25½ in.
occasional beer can, cigarettes, doors through of basic associations with reality, never makes any Galleria L'Attico, Rome
which he has passed, potted plants, shoes, and attempt to be realistic. A flesh-coloured finger may Bottom H. Matisse at work with his sketch book, 1966
works of art. A memory from childhood is just as give its hue to a table, a chair, or a wall, in the Enamel paints on canvas, 35 x 45⅝ in.
likely as not to find itself next to, or superimposed same way that the flowered print of a sofa- Galleria L'Attico, Rome