Valerio Adami and Salvo, two artist who have marked a fundamental furrow in Italian painting of the second half of the 20th century, identifying themselves through a distinctive and internationally recognised style.

With this bi-personal exhibition, Dep Art Gallery aims to emphasise the common points of two artists, both protagonists of solo exhibitions in the gallery in 2022, who continue to identify themselves at a time characterised by the return of figurative painting by the public, critics and the market.

Both Adami and Salvo, albeit with different languages, address the contemporary with works that are so topical as to be taken as a model for subsequent generations.

Crucial to this is the adherence to figuration, which the two artists interpret with a highly personal and fundamental voice.

Valerio Adami, on the one hand, expresses himself with large, flat, bright and vivid backgrounds, demarcated by black lines that describe figures, rooms, animals and environments stolen from the world of memory; if the line is the primary aspect of the creation of the work, it becomes the pivot on which a universally recognised style is based, which, over the course of the artist's career, has moved away from the aspects shared with comic strips and Nouvelle Figuration, until it has reached its own unique and univocal dimension. A dynamic narrative, Adami's, which retains a generative energy and a strong drive in close relationship between memory and actuality.

Salvo has made painting his own expressive method since the mid-1970s when, having exhausted the poverist parenthesis, he returned to confront himself with the great masters, with a manner that has never allowed itself to be overtaken by comparison, thus finding its own way. Salvo succeeded in making himself the protagonist of a way of painting in which the main interest is the essence of the things portrayed: architecture, landscapes, moments of the day and night are thus crystallised in what is the truest aspect of each instant, ceasing to be subject to the regulation of time and space, to arrive at the external synthesis of form, obtained by means of a 'cultured' painting that makes contours, chiaroscuro and contrasts its main feature. The light, whether from the sun or from a street lamp, creates nuances that change the illuminated volumes, transforming their colours and perception, in a stylistic grandeur that is never an end in itself but always aimed at the work's maximum yield.

Valerio Adami and Salvo are therefore, in terms of their careers, quality and expressive uniqueness, among the protagonists of a season capable of gaining international recognition and appreciation, continuing to be among the most important names in Italian painting.