Although long associated with Narrative Figuration, here Valerio Adami evokes the neo-classical drawing tradition, returning to his roots when he studied at the Accademia di belle arti di Brera a Milano. He created most of the dozen previously unseen new works in his Montmartre studio. They feature complex compositions where his famous wavy black line encircles and dissects each shape as the nomadic artist continues to explore his favourite themes: travel, music, literature and theatre. While some pieces have autobiographical touches or suggest vignettes from daily life, others pay explicit tribute to figures he admires, such as a work dedicated to the great poet Walt Whitman and another to Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

Now more than ever, Valerio Adami defines his practices as a “philosophical questioning of the verb.” Enigmatic and accomplished, his painting defies the laws of perspective by multiplying planes and vanishing lines. The bright, unusual colours contrast with the apparent melancholy of the characters who populate his work. The painter seeks to use these distortions to give rise to new meanings. As he explains: “Therein lies the mystery and magic of painting: the creation of a myth, of this conflict between the temporal and the timeless.”