During his studies at the Brera Academy Fine Arts in Milan from 1951 to 1954, and directed by Achille Funi, one of the founders of the Novecento artistic movement, Valerio Adami became fascinated by Renaissance artists and initiated himself to mural art. Drawing antique molds has marked his hand’s memory and he likes to say that he seeks in drawing “the equivalents of a simple past, present and future”. Claiming to be part of the academic tradition, he also refers to the aesthetic of German Neoclacissim’s master, Raphaël Mengs (1728-1779). Since 1963, Adami has been elaborating his plastic language. He majestically combines the influences of Wifredo Lam and Roberto Matta with the nostalgia of Alberto Magnelli and Juan Gris Cubism in very graphic works marked by formal dislocations. Paradoxically, the discovery of fragmentation of a Cubist drawing allowed him to confirm his classical ambitions by describing the object in a complex and simultaneous physical reality. The fragmentation of space, and the effects of surface and three-dimensionality give way to a serpentine and sensual line in suites of closed forms. His work plays on juxtapositions, combinations, the fusion of ideas, emotions, impulses, always using the line which is the true signature of his aesthetic. This very sharp line is the starting point and the end of the drawing, it is his signature style, his writing. This outline, this contour line, encloses historical events, landscapes, portraits of celebrities and leads from the real to the symbolic, to a kind of cultural as well as personal allegory. An ultimate painter of modern life, a key player in the Narrative Figuration, Adami studies, both intimate and collective urbanity. He explores places of passage, private places, some closed and hushed, others open to adventure, places where the notion of time is exacerbated or elusive: bathrooms, public toilets, hotel lobbies and rooms, store windows, train compartments... He offers a philosophical message about painting, moving from views of New York's Chelsea Hotel in the 1960s to comments on current events in the 2000s inspired by mythology, always rythmed by ambiguous associations with underlying sexuality that emerges from his subconscious. The surface of the painting is the page on which all the narratives are tied and untied, but the traces of our real world, of this contemporary life that he prints are falsely figurative. With his flat tones of pure and shadowless tones, it is the color that becomes drawing, syllables, words. His work fascinates the viewer because it makes them aware that this world of visible things in which we work, we live, we travel, we live, we love ... also reflects our solitude, our isolation. In his eyes, painting is a matter of "moral fabric": it is a matter of "keeping people away from intolerance, of sticking to the event of a hope, a truth, this vocation towards the divine where this other fabric, mythological, is recognized, it supports a culture". In the continuity of his compatriot Giorgio de Chirico, the work of Adami is a mental journey appealing to the collective and cultural memory. He plunges us into a world where simple reality becomes metaphysical, and when each moment that is lived again through the filter of memories becomes a trigger for new dazzling images.