Valerio Adami's painting style is derived from the visual language of the comics: a black circle for an eye or a mouth, linear shorthand notational drawing of objects, conventions for mirror reflections, faucets or furniture, dotted lines and other cartoon codes for action. People tend to be rendered in parts, with hair, a shoulder curve, a knee, breasts, or buttocks indicated in their logical location, but not necessarily connected comprehensively. Bright solid colors are applied in opaque planes throughout, but they are rarely descriptive and usually unsettling. In Caprichos Americano, 1979, a mustached man with a wide-brimmed fuschia hat pulled down over his eyes leans against a door behind two big birds (seagulls?) holding a large circular orange disk with a drawing of a three-masted schooner on it. He, the door, floor, and land or seascape behind him, are all shades of green, from pea to olive. The print is dedicated to his "friend Jack," perhaps the subject, though it might also be about any American caprice, perhaps even Columbus' voyage here on such a ship. But then the title might refer to the capriciousness of Adami's color chords or the liberties taken with anatomy.

Valerio Adami was classically trained in drawing at Milan's Brera Academy from the age of seven. He developed a language of drawn signs as a child in order to communicate with his deaf grandfather and he drew upon that in his mature paintings. He had his first one person show in Milan in 1957 at the age of 22. Beginning then he spent most of every year outside Italy, either in New York, Paris, Jerusalem, Mexico, or Bombay. A few years later, influenced by things American -- comics, Pop art, advertisements, Time magazine -- Adami turned his back on the long humanistic tradition still predominant in Italy since the Renaissance, and began painting American things. Swimming pools, materialistic consumer goods, hotel rooms, bathrooms, his surroundings at the Chelsea Hotel on 23rd Street where he lived for a time, and seamy Times Square became his subjects. By the mid-1960s his work was included in all of the major international exhibitions, shown in galleries and bought by museums the world over. His international reputation continues with exhibitions and retrospectives in major galleries and museums in New York, Paris, Tokyo, London, Barcelona, Milan, and Zurich.