The Brooklyn Rail has reviewed Alice in the Land of Violence at David Nolan Gallery in New York, an exhibition gathering paintings and drawings by Valerio Adami from the 1960s, when the artist was in his late twenties and early thirties and developing the delineated, fragmented figuration that would become his signature. The show runs from 9 September to 24 October 2026. The review, by Saul Ostrow, notes that Adami remains little known in the United States, as is true of many postwar European artists and movements that do not fit the narrative of American postwar modernism. He is perhaps best known here through Jacques Derrida's long 1975 essay devoted to his drawings, '+R (Into the Bargain)'. Adami, born in Bologna in 1935, built a practice on the acknowledgment that all representation is an abstraction. His best-known works reduce fragmented bodies and objects to flat planes of colour separated by thick black lines, producing a graphic, poster-like effect. The lines do not merely outline shapes: they dissect, analyse and construct a discontinuous reality, creating what the review calls an intellectual and perceptual cartography of a world that no longer holds together. The earliest works in the show begin in a stylistically self-aware expressionist idiom, inflected by Surrealism after Adami's 1955 encounter with Roberto Matta in Paris. The review traces how the artist moves toward the discontinuous image-world of his later painting, rooting his practice in literature, psychoanalysis and philosophical inquiry rather than Pop, despite superficial graphic correspondences. The exhibition's title, taken from a 1963 painting, evokes a journey into a strange and threatening world in which wonder has been displaced by violence, registering the instability of a decade riven by political conflict, the escalating Vietnam War and a divided Cold War world.