Giuseppe Adamo

Alcamo, Trapani, 1982. Based in Palermo

One of the essential figures on the new Sicilian painting scene, the painter Giuseppe Adamo wields a refined pictorial language free of narrative obligations, traversing a borderland between figuration and abstraction.
His works bear smooth, burnished surfaces, utterly devoid of material density, from which three-dimensional forms emerge, attained through highly fluid paint and composed of superimpositions, transparencies and tonal variations. Each painting, with imaginary furrows and illusory incisions, seems to relay the micro-residue of a vegetable or mineral macrocosm. Seen from another perspective, this intimate glimpse, this almost microscopic investigation, becomes a bird’s-eye view: the charting of topographical maps, stretches of terrain, gardens or terrestrial or lunar crusts. While it is true that abstraction dominates in these works, it is equally true that the pursuit of form – or rather, its incipience – is never abandoned. Thus, as ultra-flat images invert themselves into an almost craggy density, monochromatic matter clings to opportunities for borders, for discrete patterns, for forms stranded in the pictorial texture, somewhere between environmental archaeology and hallucination.
In his most recent works, Adamo has extended his practice into cognitive deception and the relationship between natural phenomena and the pictorial process, introducing new elements that extend his field of activity into more explicitly figurative terrain; fragments of faces and anatomical details unfold into the pure matter of the paint, initiating a broader reflection on the passage of time and the material dimension of our existence.
A graduate of the Palermo Academy of Fine Arts, he has exhibited in solo and group shows in Italy and abroad since 2006. Among the most notable: Relationship and Difference (two-person show with Jachym Fleig), Kunstverein Trier Junge Kunst, Trier, Germany (2020); Giuseppe Adamo Solo Show, Moon Contemporary, Castello di Carini, Palermo (2019); De Prospectiva Pingendi: Nuovi scenari della pittura italiana, Palazzo del Popolo, Todi, Perugia (2018); Die Grosse, Kunstausstellung NRW Düsseldorf, Museum Kunstpalast, Germany (2016).