The surprising illusion of Giuseppe Adamo's painting

They lie somewhere between the abstract and the figurative in the works of Giuseppe Adamo (Alcamo, 1982), an elegant 38-year-old Sicilian painter. His path began at theAcademy of Fine Arts in Palermo and it can be said that he has never left Sicily, since the artist moved his first experiences on the island (here he participated in his first group show, the second edition of the exhibition Nervi saldi. Le officine dell’arte, held in 2006 at the Cantieri Culturali della Zisa, and held his first solo exhibition, entitled Costellazioni 02. Sopralluoghi, at the Galleria dell’Arco in Palermo), and that he lives and works in Palermo, although he has made his mark in Italy and abroad.

Giuseppe Adamo’s is a painting that does not feel narrative needs, in every sense: there is no desire for representation. We see surfaces, which appear to us almost like maps, like landscapes, like rocky agglomerations, and their extraordinary peculiarity lies in the fact that the ripples seem to emerge from the canvas, with a very strong feeling of three-dimensionality. You walk around them, trying to figure out if what you have in front of you is a sculpture and not a painting: in reality, those of Giuseppe Adamo are perfectly flat, two-dimensional surfaces, without any thickness. The artist manages to achieve this effect with a skillful use of color glazing, which has its roots in the art of the Renaissance (Giorgione’s landscapes are among his sources of inspiration): the color, which comes after a preliminary drawing, is spread over several layers with a very liquid paint, and transparencies and calibrated modulations of light intervene on the color, giving rise to the final illusionistic effect.

These are mostly monochromatic paintings: variations on green, ochre, brown. Which concur to create universes where the viewer enjoys finding whatever he or she wants: a lunar surface, a plowed field, a mountainous landscape, a forest seen from above, the texture of a stalactite, an unspecified set of micro-organisms. Or, more simply, the astonishing abilities of a painter who can play with planes, light, and color to result in compositions that challenge the viewer’s perception-Giuseppe Adamo, after all, is fascinated by the way people’s ideas and preconceptions falter as perception changes.

Giuseppe Adamo, Facking gold 2 (2019; acrylic on canvas, 190 x 130 cm)

Giuseppe Adamo, False memory of a Hindu temple (2019; acrylic on canvas, 190 x 130 cm)

Giuseppe Adamo, New Dawn (2015; acrylic on canvas, 120 x 100 cm)

Giuseppe Adamo’s, wrote Massimo Mattioli, who curated his most recent solo exhibition(Landing, held in 2019 at the Venetian gallery Marignana Arte), is “an original approach, impossible to associate with evocative models.” Adamo is an artist who identifies “dissimulation, ambiguity and mimesis as the elective territories of his creative act and his interfacing with the world,” who “places the viewer before an intriguing perceptual synaesthesis in which everything blurs together, prompting him to search for a highly personal and stimulating visual synthesis,” and who arrives at an “estrangement from reality that leads him to construct another and overlapping reality.” There has also been talk of “non-abstraction” to refer to the ambivalence of Giuseppe Adamo’s painting.

Monochromes are, of course, not the only motifs in Giuseppe Adamo’s art, although it is on these that most of his more recent production focuses. There are also landscapes that express a desire to evoke a sensation (for example, The morning after your death, a 2018 work where Giuseppe Adamo’s typical procedure is used to cloud a delicate hilly landscape with a watery haze, and to evoke all the sensations of the case, an operation somewhat facilitated by the title chosen by the painter: in fact, it is worth remembering that Adamo very often combines rather eloquent titles to his works), and in the early stages of his career there are also strands of research on the human figure, for example in the Bedtime sketches of 2011 (“bed sketches,” executed directly under the blankets, with figures drawn quickly, as if emerging from dreamlike visions), or in the collages from which already emerges that sense of three-dimensionality and optical illusion that characterizes the Sicilian artist’s most recent and celebrated production.

What is certain is that such aniconic painting requires, even on the part of the relative, a certain disposition: “silence and slowness,” wrote critic Sergio Troisi in 2016, who, reviewing Adamo’s exhibition at Galleria Rizzuto Arte in Repubblica, likened his landscapes to Corrado Cagli’s Carte (actually oils on canvas that achieved astonishing mimetic effects, imitating crumpled sheets). “A poetics of the sublime, that of the Palermo artist recently established as one of the most interesting presences on the art scene not only in Sicily, played on the perceptual ambivalence between the rendering of color on the surface and the even virtuosic illusion of three-dimensionality and space.” To be looked at by seeking its meaning from the painter’s meticulous technique.

Giuseppe Adamo, The morning after your death (2018; acrylic on canvas, 50 x 40 cm)

Giuseppe Adamo, a drawing from the series Bedtime sketches

Giuseppe Adamo, a drawing from the series Bedtime sketches

Giuseppe Adamo, Movement disorders (2016; acrylic on canvas, 50 x 40 cm)

Giuseppe Adamo, Sulcus 2 (2016; acrylic on canvas, 100 x 80 cm)

Giuseppe Adamo, A huge block of silence (2016; acrylic on canvas, 68 x 48 cm)

The surprising illusion of Giuseppe Adamo's painting

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