CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH Camilla Adami was born Camilla Cantoni Mamiani della Rovere on 20th January 1939 in Milan, to a noble father of Jewish origin and a Catholic mother. At the early age of four years old, her life was dealt a terrible blow when her father and grandmother were taken away by the SS, Leibstandarte ‘Adolf Hitler’ division, from the Cantoni villa in Arona on Lake Maggiore. No one ever heard of them again. Her life would then be dedicated to battling her fears and vertigo. After her father's disappearance, she spent her childhood with her two little brothers, twins Andrea and Gianluca, in the family villa of her mother Resy Gattico in Maggiora on the hills of Novara, where she started school. Around 1948, the three siblings moved to Milan and attended Catholic schools, the twins at Gonzaga and Camilla at Sacro Cuore, where she began to give free rein to her creativity and imagination by writing fantasy stories. She then attended Manzoni high school and completed her secondary education at the Suore Orsoline art school, where she found her vocation, which led her to enrol at the Brera Academy. Already at the time of Brera, she was considered a talented artist. In the 1950s, between the Academy, which then represented for her the ultimate expressive freedom, and the Bar Jamaica, she began to make friends with artists and intellectuals such as the painter Bepi Romagnoni, the painter and writer Emilio Tadini, Gianni Colombo, a future designer, the writer Dino Buzzati, and the director Giancarlo Romani Adami, who in 1958 introduced her to his brother Valerio, who had already graduated from Brera and was beginning his career as an artist. 1960-1980 Valerio and Camilla fell in love and married in 1962. From that moment on, their life became a story of great encounters, travels around the world and successes that saw them protagonists for over sixty years of an unbreakable bond centred on art, respect and love. She lived with Valerio in the early 1960s at Villa Cantoni in Arona, a meeting place and environment for artist friends from all over the world, such as the poet Edouard Glissant, the Cuban activist writer Carlos Franqui, the painter Titina Maselli, Dino Buzzati, the Spanish painter Eduardo Arroyo, the philosopher Jacques Derrida and many others. The Adamis chose Paris as their city to live in, here in 1975, thanks to a recommendation from Aimé Maeght, Valerio's dealer and a dear friend of both, they bought a beautiful apartment in Montmartre in the same building on Rue Becquerel where Gala had lived with Salvador Dalí. From that moment on, Camilla became the life and soul of Parisian intellectual society. There was no artist, conductor, writer or philosopher passing through Paris who did not spend an evening at their home. Camilla would prepare dinners for dozens of people in a matter of hours and had the ability to bring together such diverse minds that she created a veritable cultural salon. Confident in her husband's talent, she decided to support him for the first twenty years of their marriage and devote herself to creating a network of acquaintances around them that allowed him to dedicate himself body and soul to drawing and painting. In the mid-1970s, she had the opportunity to work as a theatre set designer in France at the Carpentras Festival, as a designer for Elio Fiorucci, with whom she remained friends throughout her life, and then for the French television channel FR3. 1980-2000 In the early 1980s, she rediscovered the pencil she had put down since her days at the Academy and, in just a few years, she amazed everyone. In the previous twenty years, she had met important contemporary artists, taken part in debates on modernity and acquired a solid intellectual knowledge of the arts, gained maturity and developed a great awareness of the role of art and the artist. Although figurative art was no longer at the forefront in the 1980s, the scene being dominated by video art, photography, performance and installations, Camilla Cantoni Adami chose to explore the figure, the body and nature with her pencil and brush in her search for a visceral and authentic relationship with art. Pencils and paper were immense dimensions to confront human fears and try to control the chaos in which she felt human beings were helpless. Her only resources were the strength of the body, passion and sensuality. In 1980, she began drawing a series of large-scale portraits of intellectual friends, including Italo Calvino, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Dupin, Luciano Berio and Saul Steinberg, which were exhibited at the Galleria del Naviglio in Milan. The portraits immediately revealed her great talent, both from a technical point of view and in her ability to capture the shadows and anxieties of the human soul. Since picking up her pencil again, Camilla Cantoni Adami did not entitle her works individually, collected them in thematic series, which are pieces of a much larger puzzle in which the artist immerses herself. Hers is a compassless search for a possible and inaccessible truth. Mystery, fears, conflicts, the body, nature and animals become the protagonists of a journey without destination into the depths of the relationship between the artist and the world. Since the early 1990s, the Adamis have spent their summers in Meina, on Lake Maggiore, where Valerio built a large studio and Camilla carved out a ‘room of her own’ in the chicken coop in the woods of the garden, an extremely frugal outdoor space covered by a canopy and a net. That wooden platform immersed in nature and exposed to its elements kept her in touch with her explorations. She was always accompanied by her beloved radio and the Domenica Quiz, which marked the rhythm of her days. Between the late 1980s and early 1990s, she painted a series of large-format works entitled ‘Vertigo and Contamination', featuring naked bodies hanging from ropes floating in the void, enveloped in a sort of magma (she would hang herself by her feet from the stairs of her studio in the Alésia district of Paris and be photographed, or do the same with her friends when they came to visit her). In the early 1990s, she appeared as an actress playing a painter who lives next door to the protagonist in Giovanna Gagliardo's film ‘Caldo Soffocante’. This was not her first experience in the world of cinema. In 1971, she appeared in the film Vacanze nel Deserto, written by Valerio Adami and directed by Giancarlo Romani Adami, alongside Aldo Mondino, Dino Buzzati and her friend, the painter Erró. In 2020, she will appear as herself in Hejer Charf's documentary ‘[A]nnées en parenthèses’. At the end of the 1990s, in her new studio in the Marais, she painted the series ‘Conflitti’ (Conflicts), in which, using images purchased from the Reuters agency, she portrayed women and men returning from the war in Kosovo, onto which she projected archive footage from news programmes of the time. In her 1999 exhibition ‘Le Paure’ at the Mole Vanvitelliana in Ancona, these images take on a rhythm and great expressive vigour, inviting a response and a sense of responsibility, as Paolo Fabbri writes in the exhibition's critical text. 2000-2020 In the 2000s, she began drawing the ‘Primates’ series in pencil and charcoal, depicting monkeys, chimpanzees and baboons with the same expressive force as her portraits of her intellectual friends. The eyes of these primates pierce the paper or canvas and go straight to the heart of the viewer, who feels called to a silent and impossible dialogue with a nature from which they have now distanced themselves insurmountably. Since 2010, she started painting ‘Rituali magici’ (Magical Rituals), a series that depicts a world inaccessible to human rationality, inhabited, as the philosopher Michel Onfray wrote, by ‘ the breath of a wing, the passing of a lizard's claws, the flow of air blown by an angry reptile, the sweet whistle of a snake making its way under the skin of the desert, the night-time croaking of toads in heat, and waiting salamanders'. She found a soulmate and artistic partner in the sculptor Nisa Chevenement, and they exhibited together in various exhibitions in France, Mexico and China. From 2015, she has also painted smaller canvases, which she assembled into scenic compositions that seem to tell intimate yet universal stories of body parts, Indian gods and deformed faces. One of her latest cycles, from 2020, is inspired by the domestic settings portrayed by the painter Edouard Vuillard, whose works she had seen forty years earlier in New York. This cycle is also linked to the ‘Femmes Fatales’ series, created between 2016 and 2020, which depicts women of different ages in their domestic spaces, their gazes observing the viewer and inviting them to linger in the mystery of the relationship. Between 2021 and 2022, Camilla Adami created her last series, ‘Grand Hotel’. She died in her home in Meina overlooking her beloved Lake Maggiore on 13 May 2023 following an illness. Camilla Adami left behind a body of work that invites us into the depths of our human and animal nature and helps us face our fears without masks or veils. Jacques Derrida, Paolo Fabbri, Omar Calabrese, Jacques Dupin, Michel Onfray, Jane Kramer and other critics and philosophers have written about her. A BRIEF PORTRAIT ‘As was traditional in France at the time, I took my husband's name, Adami, and from that moment on I always signed my works Camilla Adami,’ she told those who asked her why she did not sign with her maiden name, Cantoni Mamiani. Thus, in the memory of all those who knew her as an artist, she has always been Camilla Adami. Year after year, canvas after canvas, the artist sought her own path, ‘with a passion for patience, endurance, the energy to wait, even for the imminent, of which I know very few examples in painting’, wrote the philosopher and her great friend Jacques Derrida. She also left indelible memories in the minds of her friends and those who had the good fortune and grace to know her, to talk to her, to sit at her table and find themselves face to face with someone who was not afraid to look the roughest side of existence in the eye. She dressed extravagantly and liked everything that was unconventional and did not conform to ordinary aesthetic criteria, right up to the last provocations, even artistic ones, of her compositions of walls covered with paintings that winked at trash. Going with her to flea markets was a unique aesthetic experience, as was entering her wardrobe, where clothes she had picked up at flea markets lay piled up, dismantled and sewn back together by hand in the mornings before she left for the studio. Her supportive relationship with her husband Valerio Adami was a love story between two artists with diametrically opposed visions of art, which were therefore mutually nourishing.