Famed for his acid-toned paintings, Valerio Adami has chosen Impasse Beaubourg for the first exhibition of his drawing show, based on a completely new concept: every preparatory sketch he has made over the past three years. These forty-odd drawings combine to create what is, in effect, a drawn diary in which the artist’s obsessional themes – travel, music, literature – are revealed in all their complexity.

Drawings are fundamental to Valerio Adami’s work; created over several days, they form the matrix for every one of his paintings. The paper retains the traces of his revisions, the succession of sketches. Adami feels that the drawings are witness to, and the memory of, his paintings.

As he puts it: “the essence of my self is found in the drawings. The painter’s aim is to add shape and volume to the drawing. But even where the drawings are abstract, their syntax must remain perfectly concrete.”

For Adami, lines and closed shapes are closely tied to word and language. A friend of both Italo Calvino and Jacques Derrida, Valerio Adami conceives his paintings as philosophical interrogations of the verb. He says that: “entire days spent on the drawings, erasing their every mundane trace. (Measuring up to Utopia is one way of knowing the truth.) All these drawings are but the seasonal fruits of the tree that we are, etc. Drawings without shadows and without anguish, where light and darkness lie together within the line. There are tiny keys in the closed form, that move the whole.”