Valerio Adami's works are primarily inspired by French Colonialism and Pop artists, especially Roy Lichtenstein with his interest in comics and advertisements. In 1964, Adami turned to a graphic style, no longer modulating his colors but making them saturated within flat planes to create disturbing images like disconnected body parts in domestic interiors. With their intensely contrasting hues and acute angles, the paintings have a shattered, prismatic quality while still pertaining to a narrative, fable, or myth. His cartoon-like compositions start off as drawings based on banal media photographs found in newspapers or magazines, and usually have a satirical edge.

Adami has also incorporated portraits of various intellectuals in his works. These include giant figures in literature, music, history, art, and philosophy, attracting in Adami's treatment much attention from novelists and philosophers such as Italo Calvino and Jacques Derrida. His work was seen as a foil to Abstract Expressionism, being regarded as a form of Neo-Figuration. Because of his use of recognizable imagery, Adami is linked to the Narrative Figuration (French Pop) movement, popular in France in the 1960s with artists like Jacques Monory, Erro, and Gérard Schlosser.