Ascensione 1984

Valerio Adami made this painting, Ascensione, with flat colour fields contained within bold black outlines. The clear outlines and unmodulated colours give it the feel of a cartoon or graphic novel, yet also harks back to early modernist painting. Look at how the figure stands with his back to us, carrying a building inside of his coat, a mountain rising behind him. The paint application is smooth and opaque, without any visible brushstrokes. This adds to the image’s graphic quality and emphasizes its conceptual nature. The lack of texture pushes the work away from illusionism, towards a more symbolic and abstract representation of reality. It reminds me a little of David Hockney's work, with its similar flattening of perspective, but Adami pushes it into a more dreamlike territory. What is real here? What is the figure carrying? Art embraces ambiguity, allowing for multiple interpretations rather than fixed meanings.