Valerio Adami and Philippe Bonnefis: A Study in Signs and Surfaces

Philippe Bonnefis's book on Valerio Adami, published by Éditions Galilée, explores the painter's work through a lens of literary and semiotic analysis. Bonnefis examines Adami's use of the ampersand in a portrait of Freud, comparing its loops to fishhooks. He situates Adami not within Pop art or philosophy but alongside Giorgio de Chirico, Kurt Schwitters, and the Lettrists. The text discusses Adami's transition from drawing to painting as a surgical operation, with seams likened to the leads of stained glass windows. Bonnefis identifies the muse of painting as Hippocrene, whose hoof gouged out an eye, rather than Dibutade. The analysis focuses on Adami's violent treatment of the upper face in his portraits, influenced by Francis Bacon's screaming mouth from the Odessa Steps sequence in Battleship Potemkin. The book includes a bookmark featuring an apple peel observed in Aesop's hand, which Bonnefis reads as a sign of the blind eye in modern painting. Adami, a Pisces, has banished the mouth from his work, opening the abyss of painting through Bacon. The enterprise is described as unjoyful, with faces and names reduced to 'a pitiful heap of suffering peels.' The review is written by Frédérique Joseph-Lowery.