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| l'Ecologista - mixed media |
A woman artist with an intriguingly incongruous,
attention-getting name, the Italian painter known as Adam A appears at first
glance to be a stylistic relative of both the Cobra group and A.R. Penck, given
the seemingly intuitive neo-primitive energy of her iconography. Looked at from
a more homegrown angle, the work on view on Adam A's website (essereadama.com)
could also seem a direct extension of Italy's own Transavanguardia movement of
the late 1970s, given the vital new spin that she puts on the visual vocabulary
of Expressionism as it was revived in the late 1970s, given the vital new spin
that she puts on the visual vocabulary of Expressionism as it was revived in
the late 1970s by Sandro Chia, Francesco Clemente, and Enzo Cucchi.
Yet the more of her work one sees, the more one realizes
that Adam A is a true original who hoplds no allegiances to any particular
school or tendency, having evolved her own distinctly international answer to
how, in an age that often seems dominated by robotic technology and multimedia,
the venerable tradition of painterly figuration can remain a valid vehicle for
simultaneosly conveying a sense of contemporary angst and timeless beauty.
The refreshing directness and power of Adam A's work is
immediately evident in her painting “La Vita”, which celebrates the richness of
life and love with two starkly
simplified overlapping heads inscribed in a raggedly elegant line akin to that
of the late American graffiti prodigy Jean Michel-Basquiat and set against a
vibrant orange ground further enlivened by a variety of rough symbols and
muscular gestures. Adam A, however, moderates her spontaneity with a European
aesthetic refinement that imbues her work with its own special tension.
A more pointedly political feeling comes across in
“L'Ecologista”, another painting by Adam A, in which a rectangularly stylized
semiabstract figure dominates the composition, posturing, histrionically, amid
a flurry of vertical black strokes that could suggest a waist-high field of
charred grass and vigorously brushed circles within squares which could seem to
symbolize the harnessing of solar energy or its opposite: the imposition of our
geometrically rigid schemes on the organic beauty of our natural resources. Is
the dominant figure in “L'Ecologista” a noble knight set on saving the
environment, or a buffoonishly hapless ecological Don Quixote?
Adam A's combination of bold, cartoon-like simplification
and vigorous ”action painting” leaves all such questions pending.
The viewer is obliged to engage in a lively dialogue with
the painting in order to arrive at a subjective interpretation that makes him
or her feel vitally involved – almost like a collaborator with the artist!
Even more important than the many political, philosophical,
and historical issues raised in the paintings of Adam A, however, are their
purely visual, tactile, and coloristic attributes. In compositions such as
“Fecondazione”, “La Sostanza”, “Mondo” and “Confronto”, primitive stick figure
surrogates for the human image, starkly stylized heads, fragments of scrawled
text, an animated array of overlapping circular and oval shapes (sometimes
borne witness to by veritable hordes of stylized eyes) make up the artist's
abundantly teeming private world.
Thankfully absent is the self-protective irony that hobbles
and trivializes so much postmodern art. For Adam A obviously prefers to commit
herself fully to her unabashed painterly passion, which invests all of her
compositions with intrepid intensity.
-
Maurice Taplinger
published by Gallery&Studio Magazine NY – April/Maj 2010
