Worn Out: Adamo Macri’s Prêt à Porter
by Kenneth Radu
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The artist Adamo Macri no sooner disposes of one head then he grows another like the many-headed hydra, so when focussing on one or two portraits and building responses (I think building is the right word here), we are always aware that new portraits may well undercut or challenge our views of previous ones, for his portraits are often visual and symbolic narratives, and the story or stories, can change from one portrait to the next. That is their excitement; that is their genius.
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| Prêt à Porter |
As I studied Adamo Macri’s intriguing portrait Prêt à Porter and despite the title with its sartorial implications, I also thought of Caravaggio’s painting David with the Head of Goliath, and its depiction of the physically, psychologically intense conflict between turmoil and calm, darkness and light, sin and redemption. The fact that Caravaggio, himself a murderer, produced this extraordinary work during the last year of his life, painting himself as the much older Goliath and arguably as the young David, surely suggests an artist struggling with criminal passions and searching the depths of his being for a way out of his personal maelstrom. In a sense, David decapitates the worse part of him to allow virtue to emerge victorious and defeat the allure of degeneracy. This statement leads me again to look at Macri’s glinting, metallic portrait, Vice Not Virtue, with a stylized snake necklace slithering around his neck, somewhat reminiscent of the serpent the infant Jesus with assistance from his mother steps upon in Caravaggio’s Madonna and Child with St. Anne (Dei Palafrenieri).
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| David with the Head of Goliath (Caravaggio) |
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| Vice Not Virtue |
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| Madonna and Child with St. Anne (Caravaggio) |
I don’t know what personal demons Macri the man is struggling with, but I do believe Prêt à Porter is a portrait of intense psychological, perhaps even spiritual, combat. Even though like Caravaggio Macri uses his own face, in this portrait he covers it almost totally by dramatic, architectural eyewear, obscuring the eyes, and of course eyewear is a consistent motif in Macri’s oeuvre. Its dramatic presence here forces viewers to pay attention to other elements of the portrait, and to shift attention from purely biographical speculations about the artist and his travails to larger, dare I say, universal considerations.
Why is this Macri portrait called Prêt à Porter? Viewers have become aware of the subtlety in Macri’s titles, signposts, or directional words, but not necessarily absolute interpretations. Ready to wear, having worn, worn out: the progression seems inevitable. Used. Disposable. Is the title pointing to clothes or a person? Which is the commodity: the person or the fashion? Given the great black shield of the eyewear, identity disappears, regardless of who the man behind them seems to be. But that simply raises more questions. Who is the man? What is he disguising or hiding? What was his nature or proclivities in the past to account for how he appears now? What the man has left behind, what he once was and no longer is, how deeply buried his original identity: all are aspects not so much submerged as washed away, a watery metaphor to which I shall return.
Yes, of course, the portrait by its very title raises questions about high fashion and disposability, the use of style as a form of politics and class consciousness. We applaud, or bow as if yoked under the arbitrariness and whimsy of designs. Questions of ethics surrounding the fickleness and volatility of high fashion, with most of us wearing standardized, ready-made clothes influenced by haute couture, lead to notions of dispensability and irrelevance, one person as interchangeable with another as clothes on a hanger. Is it an illusion of individual expression or subtle form of general oppression?
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| Night (series) |
The devil may wear Prada but I suspect he/she/they prefers down and dirty action to this year’s winter line, concupiscence to clothing, a preference implied in Macri’s strong, black and white portraits of a somewhat overused man. Let me be fanciful here and argue that Prêt à Porter is conceivably the same character who appears in the series of erotically charged, “bad boy” portraits of a devil-may-care, hedonistic rebel in Night Call, After Hours, Late Shift, and Runaway Circuit. Here is a man who looks as if he’s played too many a dangerous game. Having exhausted the nefarious possibilities, or fucked to the point of indifference, in Prêt à Porter he now remains somewhat worn out, worn down, and living with the detritus of his actions, clothed in black, a colour not associated with joy. The background is indistinct, grey with a barely perceptible pattern. That being said, there’s an element of bravado in these pictures, a kind of movie star pose about what a tough guy might look like. With a toss of the head and forward thrusting chin, the man also seems to be daring us, come at me, bro, certainly not running away from a fright, as Caravaggio ran away from the scene of his crime. Collectively, this series, despite the apparent pugnacity, is erotically charged. I still get the feeling, however, of “after the fact” or “after the ball,” and past actions not worth the effort. Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129 is particularly apt here:
Th' expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action; and till action, lust
Is perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame,
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust;
Enjoyed no sooner but despisèd straight:
Macri’s man is left drained, dissatisfied, spiritually panic-stricken, perhaps like the miscreant and murderer Caravaggio, who painted the glorious canvas, The Seven Acts of Mercy, also known as the Misericordia, towards the end of his difficult life, perhaps murder weighing heavily on his conscience, and seeking human, even divine succour. As if in painting, as in Macri’s portraits, a form of salvation can be found through art. Macri’s man in Prêt à Porter may not have severed a head (how are we to know?), or otherwise attempted to cut out the insalubrious parts of his being, but he’s clearly worn out, and wearing a mournful robe like a sackcloth. And I am reminded that biblically speaking a sackcloth was no fine silken garment, but one woven out of coarse animal hair. I cannot help but feel that the man has much to answer for. As Isaiah laments, “woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips.”
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| The Seven Acts of Mercy (Caravaggio) |
II
For a work whose title draws attention to attire, it’s curious that we see very little of the actual clothes the figure is wearing, except for the black colour. Massively black, as black as anything in Caravaggio, call it tenebrism if you wish, but it’s not high fashion since it obliterates distinctive styles or elements of haute couture. I suspect that we may pay too much attention to the literal meaning of titles, a risky venture in art as allusively charged as many of Macri portraits are. The title of Prêt à Porter points to several directions, and much is left to the viewer’s imagination as to its meaning, aside from the surface meaning, the same viewer has who has grown alert to the irony, self-mockery, layered and/or symbolic significance of Macri’s titles. Made to measure, or ready to wear, one size fits all, new or old: the condition of fabric or the condition of mind, or, if one is religiously inclined, condition of the soul. I use the word religion advisedly, especially since the man in Macri’s portrait has an aura of the Man of Sorrows.
A phrase usually associated with the crucified Christ, originating, I believe, in Byzantine Christian art depicting Jesus after he has been taken down from the cross. Many artists have been inspired by such a figure. Durer’s drawing of that title comes to mind immediately, and a curiously gentle painting by Murillo, as well as Botticelli’s extraordinary Christ figure in his canvas bearing the title The Man of Sorrows. The halo in Botticelli’s work consists of miniature angels, each holding a tool required for construction of the cross and the actual crucifixion: things like a ladder, nails, spear. Forgive me if I am looking for parallels where none exist, but I fancy the spikes sticking theatrically out of the man’s eyewear in Macri’s Vice Not Virtue indicate not only menace and potential injury, but also a perverse, comical halo poking out of the frame of blue-tinted eyewear, blue so notably associated with divinity in religious art: but here, a demon not an angel. I’m not arguing for anything Christ-like in Prêt à Porter, but the lines in this particular composition contribute to the impression of a man sunk in psychic pain and melancholy: not a much-abused saviour of the world or a runway model, but someone burdened with private pain and sorrows that we can all feel. One may consider the nefarious role fashion plays in our lives, but from another angle the portrait is also depicting something entirely different. Indeed, the lines in Prêt à Porter are remarkable, created by the lengths of hair strands and their careful arrangement.
As I look at and think about these lines, I also study Ensor’s grotesque image of misery in his painting The Man of Sorrows. Misery is dramatized by a complicated series of rusty-orange, blood imbued lines running down his head, face and chin, the crown of thorns etched in by more lines. Deep furrows and ridges sink in his face, as if it’s been gouged by horror, which accounts for dead-looking eyes and a mouth partially opened like a tomb’s door. The strokes of blue pigment throughout and a choker around his neck only intensify the impressions: not a pretty picture, but crucifixions aren’t meant to be pretty, divine or not. Yes, it’s a depiction of the crucified Christ, but it’s also a personification of individual depression and despair.
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| The Man of Sorrows (James Ensor) |
Let me not, however, slip into the slough of despond and writhe in misfortune lest my face become furrowed with lines of despair. And yet, the hair in Macri’s portrait hangs limp, wet, resting against or tracing the skin like the intricate patterns of Hindu body art, known as mehindi. Macri is adept and careful when arranging hair and shadows in his art. The patterns on the skin, for example, in the priestly portrait Orgone Box convey an aura of calm and intensity. In Prêt à Porter the lines of hair suggest scarring, and again I am reminded that Caravaggio’s face was mutilated and left scarred by a vicious knife attack, a not uncommon form of revenge in Italy at the time, known as sfregio. Macri’s portrait doesn’t induce feelings of wonder and joy, nor, despite its title, does it really remind me of the politics of high fashion or shopping for a standardized new shirt. It arouses powerful feelings nonetheless. Unlike Ensor’s grotesque portrait, pulsing with horror, a sense of exhaustion hangs over Macri’s work, the body having become a hanger not for garments off the rack, but for the clothing of collapse, the anonymity of the face not the impassive visage of the model, but a mask of misery.
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| Orgone Box |
The man in Prêt à Porter appears as if he has been immersed in and then pulled out of water. How often do we hear the expressions drown our sorrows or drowning in sorrow? Saturation and separation, a kind of symbolic deliquescence, as if whatever is hidden behind the eyewear is changing the man to liquid, a form of drowning his sorrows and disappearing, sharing perhaps Hamlet’s intense melancholy: Oh, that this too too solid flesh would melt/ Thaw and resolve itself unto a dew. Drowned in sorrow or sorrows drowned. Water is death and water is life: as so often expressed in various symbolic ways in many cultures through the ages: once immersed with disfiguring pain of one kind or another, a person may be washed clean, rise transformed and renewed, as calm and coherent as the man depicted in Citing A Medium. And one notes the similarity of eyewear in the two portraits.
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| Citing A Medium |
So, if Caravaggio is depicting his own turmoil in the David and Goliath painting, symbolically cutting away the rotten part of him, his somewhat loaded painting of The Seven Acts of Mercy may well be a plea for human compassion and divine forgiveness for a terrible crime. One of the acts of mercy depicted in the painting is clothing the naked and impoverished. Yes, Macri’s Prêt à Porter touches upon fashion and disposability, but it also carries the viewer (porter) into the hidden depths of an agonized soul.
Kenneth Radu has published books of fiction, nonfiction and poetry. His work has been nominated for a Governor General’s award and twice received the Quebec Writers’ Federation prize for best English-language fiction. He also has written extensively for the online cultural magazine, Salon .II. He has recently completed the manuscript of a new novel, which is now undergoing revisions.
Worn Out: Adamo Macri’s Prêt à Porter
Essay by Kenneth Radu - 2025
