“I try to record coldly,” Valerio Adami has said, “My hand should be a kind of seismograph giving body to the traces left by the circuit of the imagination.” Adami started studying painting at age 10, in 1945, under the tutelage of the artist Felice Carena. By 16, he’d been accepted into Milan’s Brera Academy. And at 21, he moved to Paris and met some of the field’s greats—Roberto Matta, Wilfredo Lam. Adami’s early works were expressionistic, but in the 1960s he moved on to large-scale paintings characterized by thick black lines and flat color. Adami is now 89, and is regarded as an important philosopher. This retrospective traces 65 years of his art and thought. —Elena Clavarino