Charlie Adam - Biography


The progeny of an architect father and a "Charlie's Angels" mother, Charlie Adam was born in 1975 ‑ an excellent year for Bordeaux wines, funk music and Swedish tennis ‑ and as such seems unlikely to have been familiar with either the eras he likes referring to or with the roller disco fad (much to his regret)...


But it was the fortuitous discovery, at a garage sale in 1995, of a pair of magical glasses able to give their wearer glimpses into the past or the future and which he now wears daily without fail, that he finds the inspiration to create his pictures. The low accuracy of these glasses could be the source of any discrepancies in the references made to the 1950's, 60's; 70's or 3000's... Charlie enjoys reviving old school graphic styles and it doesn't really matter if they sometimes overlap or contradict each other, so long as the result is visually pleasing...


Obviously, the potential of his special glasses is of interest to the secret services of the world’s most powerful nations and this lets our man, under cover of being a debonair artist, to add a comfortable margin to his income by acting as a double agent. On the other hand, this means that for reasons of personal safety, he is obliged to live in a secluded top-secret bunker hidden underneath a glacier somewhere in the French Alps...

 

The Art of Charlie Adam

 

From the folklore of Chamonix….


More seriously, ski aficionados who have dared venture into the French Alps will almost certainly already have encountered Charlie Adam’s creations: they belong to the scenery of the ski resorts, be it on the walls of holiday chalets, in various ad campaigns of the resorts or in the tourist offices. The whole phenomenon began in Chamonix, his hometown and often considered the “twin” city to Zermatt, and has steadily been spreading across the borders into the international mountain and skiing scene over the last five years.

….to the magic of Zermatt and the Matterhorn


Having visited numerous alpine ski resorts, Zermatt has come to mean something special, something apart, to him. Although close to the atmosphere of Chamonix and its Mont-Blanc, Zermatt and its majestic Matterhorn symbolises in his view something even more universal: a sort of essence of the entire imagery of the alpine world. Its old wooden chalets, alphorn players, cows, yodellers, this typically Swiss something out of Heidi’s world sum up what comes to mind when people imagine the mountains, whether they come from Europe, Asia, South America or elsewhere!


And so, unsurprisingly, Charlie was immediately enthusiastic and inspired when Victor Art Events contacted him to suggest creating a new series of works on Zermatt and the Matterhorn.

Fond as he is of winter sports and alpine folklore, this graphic artist/illustrator loves to be inspired by the often kitsch clichés of a typical winter holiday and he revisits our childhood memories with a good dose of humor by making reference to all those anecdotes that our collective memories have produced on this topic. Cable car stations resembling toys, colored chalets that bring back memories of cuckoo clocks, fondue, suntanned ski guides and après-ski evenings with a wild twist…He digs deep into his memories (or those of his parents!) to let a certain forgotten retro spirit, warm, a tad nostalgic and often sarcastic come back to life! All this with an entirely contemporary pencil stroke.

The grandiose Matterhorn, that you will find here in its many aspects and which is somewhat of a leitmotiv of this exhibition, acts like a magnet on anyone who has ever been near it.

This peak is THE symbol par excellence not only of Zermatt, the Valais and Switzerland but also of the Mountains with a capital M, of challenges, of danger and of ambition… All in all everything that makes James Bond movies such a treat to watch!