This is a superb piece by the internationally renowned Italian painter and one of the few examples of his work found in Spanish collections.

In the 1960s Valerio Adami left behind his initial expressionist style and, influenced by the work of his friend the painter Roberto Matta (1911–2002) and also by comic strips and the elementary language of the mass media, he began to draw characters and objects taken from modern life though he removed them from their initial context and represented them by means of fragmentations, suppressions, mixtures, contrasts and analogies. Just like most Pop artists, he tackled the foremost landmarks of modern culture with an inquisitive spirit.

It is interesting to note how Adami liberates this everyday image of its banality, drastically restructuring and investing it with new meaning. Thus, the human figure is given the condition of an object represented against a background, losing all its autonomous value. In the foreground the composition includes a reference to Le fifre (The Fife Player), a work painted by Edouard Manet (1832-1883) in 1866 and whose influence is more than evident.

At first sight this painting reveals a strict spatial compartmentalisation achieved through a combination of drawing—thick and uniform black lines to define and organise the compositional space in a rigorous and precise manner—and colour, applied in all its purity and at its highest intensity to create a neutral and impersonal visual atmosphere.

Talking about this aspect of his work, the painter wrote: “I use colour as a visual element and not as an element of the emotional fabric. However, it is impossible to talk of an absence of emotion when addressing a painter’s work. (…) Nonetheless, it is also true that ‘impersonal’ is the word that best defines my practice... I believe that emotion is born out of the relationship between the spectator and my painting, more than out of the restitution of my emotion in the represented image. I believe that the painting should represent the universal values of the objective rather than a number of personal symbolisms.”