DECADES
Childhood
Valerio Romani Adami was born in Bologna on March 17, 1935.
His mother is of Sicilian origin, while his father descends from a family from Fermo.
His first childhood memory is a musical one: the band playing Verdi's Requiem at Guglielmo Marconi's funeral.
50's
During the Venetian summer holidays, the young Valerio had some fruitful experiences:
“Summers at the Lido also had another education in seeing in store for me. An Austrian acquaintance of my mother’s, a suitor of Aunt Bianca’s, who was on the jury of the Film Festival, would often come to visit us in our cabin on the beach; with his complicity I would spend entire afternoons in front of the screen in the Festival’s large hall, watching the films in competition. And then in Venice there was Pound, whom a young friend accompanied every day on his silent walks to the Zattere, and I soon joined them. Walking alongside that great solitary and taciturn poet was also an act of devotion to his poetry, to the Cantos, which I continue to reread even today.”
60's
In 1960 he exhibited at the Galleria l'Attico in Rome, publishing the writing Referto in the catalogue:
“Painting today is telling a story: communicating our daily life, from the facts we see with our own eyes around us, to those we are told; from mass communication: newspapers, images on television, news of war, hunger, disorders; bearing witness to the experience of this reality, beyond any vague conception, any "pictorial psychologism", any mystical and confused position, so beyond paintings produced by states close to neurosis, by sensual excitement, by ostentation of power; we must seek methods to establish an order.”
70's
Marrakech. This is the Adamis' first "Arab" journey, a journey of memory in search of the places that inspired André Gide, Pierre Loti, but also Delacroix and the orientalist painters.
In Marrakech he works on the series of paintings “Les Arabes”.
In 1970, the Musée de la Ville de Paris (ARC) dedicated a large retrospective to him, curated by Pierre Gaudibert, which later moved to the Kunstverein in Ulm.
80's
In 1980 his friend Luciano Berio dedicated a violin duet to him entitled Valerio and Italo Calvino wrote Quattro fable d'Esopo for Valerio Adami ("I 'Espresso", 5 October).
“Valerio Adami is a painter who conducts a reflection on painting, he keeps a diary of aphorisms, in which he notes his observations on the elements of drawing and painting", says the writer in an interview broadcast by RAI 3 (L'arte in domanda, 12 November 1980).
“He had given me these handwritten diaries and I wrote down many of his reflections,” Calvino writes . “On the basis of these ideas I wrote some Aesopian fables, also because he had made a painting called Aesop, fables whose characters were the line, the hand, the color, a sort of fable of his reflections [...]. Adami’s painting interests me for this analytical element, this explicit reference to a classicism that pushed me to write classical texts, like the Aesopian fables.”
90's
After leaving the large Villa Cantoni in Arona, he moved to Meina, still on his beloved Lake Maggiore, where he bought and renovated the house I Diosperi, which would be a protected summer refuge for him where he could draw.
“I like to call the pencil the 'Lapis' which was the stone of the alchemists. The tendency would be not to come out of one's shell, to live in peace in a protected room”
2000's
Upon the death of his mother Jolanda, in 2000, he dedicated the painting “Par cœur” to her. The publisher SE published the Italian edition of his notebooks, with the title Sinopie.
In Meina, in the restored Museum of Villa Faraggiana, the European Drawing Foundation, chaired by Adami, begins to plan a program of seminar activities on the theme of drawing in all its forms, as an idea, as a practice and as a philosophy of observing and giving form to reality.
2010\today
In 2011 he created the curtain for the Les Ballets theatre in Monte-Carlo.
The city of Lucca, in September, celebrates his work with a triptych of exhibitions dedicated to his drawings, paintings and watercolours. From the meeting with Ultimi cori per la Terra promessa by Giuseppe Ungaretti creates the painting “The Promised Land”, published as the cover in the insert La Lettura of "Il Corriere della Sera" (27 November 2011).