Adamo Macri’s Vlad the Beautiful
by Kenneth Radu. Narrator: Benjamin Press
Admiring his artistry, I cannot linger long over Adamo Macri’s extraordinary portrait, Vlad Ţepeş without remembering stories from my childhood. My parents’ boarder and family friend, born and raised in Romania, was particularly adept at impersonating a hungry vampire and other undead creatures. Without costumes or cosmetics, he put his entire body and voice into action and convinced me that my life was in peril. So dramatically effective was his performance that for a time in those early years, I was terrified of sleeping with the bedroom window open. I believed that strigoi (spirits of criminal or troubled people risen from their graves, often changed into feral animals in search of human blood) could slip into the room, sink their fangs in my throat, or snatch me up and fly away to a remote castle in a fog-drenched forest or a dank tomb. Yes, the proverbial garlic found a place on my windowsill, even with the window closed. Out of this vampire lore, incorporating costumes or paraphernalia and cosmetics as he often does in his portraits, the Montreal multi-media artist Adamo Macri has created such a visual tour de force that my personal memories of terror now mingle with fascination and pleasure.
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| Ţepeş |
Despite Vlad's mythical reputation, his famous portrait supposedly depicts what the man looked like in real life: still, it’s a formal image of a monarch designed more to impress with majesty than to frighten with exsanguination. One cannot fail to notice the moustache curled like his ringlets of hair, the blood red, bejewelled cap with ruby centerpiece, and large dark eyes. We tend to forget or ignore that for many ordinary Romanians and some historians Vlad Ţepeş the Voivoide, was a warrior-hero who successfully defeated invading Turkish armies and saved his home territory, Wallachia, now part of modern-day Romania. Statues in the country erected in his honour testify to that victory. True, he could be unpleasant at times, and had the unfortunate tendency of sticking prisoners of war, as well as civilians, on pikes; hence the epithet, Vlad the Impaler. It’s not Macri’s purpose, however, to paint a standard portrait of Vlad, the national hero.
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| Vlad the Impaler |
Through the transmission of folkloric stories in all their variations from one country to the next over the centuries, and their various retellings in literature and movies, Vlad has become inextricably connected with our notions of Dracula, more shaped by Bram Stoker's fiction and later cinematic productions than by history. Vlad's father was known as Vlad Dracul (dragon) because he had been awarded the Order of the Dragon by a fellow monarch. Dracul in Romanian carries demonic connotations because drac can also be a word for the devil. For example, the Romanian profanity, Du-te dracului (Go to Hell or Go to the Devil) is one I often heard spoken by adults in heated discussions. As I said, the boarder was especially adept at telling stories about demons and strigoi who roamed the forests and silently invaded bedrooms. From that perspective alone, Macri’s Vlad Ţepeş becomes an intriguing variation upon a common theme, except there is nothing common in Macri’s art.
Although I have no favourite Dracula in literature or cinema, I do admire, if admire is the correct word, F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (1922), which I first saw at Montreal’s now defunct Cinema V Repertory Theatre. There’s much to say about this controversial film, but I wish only to mention that its wordlessness intensifies thrilling sensations of horror more than dialogue or screams. Bela Lugosi perhaps introduced the character of Dracula in film as an urbane, eastern European aristocrat with hypnotic eyes, but he never truly terrifies. Everyone jokingly tries to imitate Lugosi’s accent: “I am Count Dracula. Welcome to my house.”
Max Schreck, the actor who played the creature named Count Orlok in Murnau’s film, has no voice, and his Dracula is anything but physically appealing, devoid of any pretence of aristocratic elegance or debonair debauchery. More a walking phantom than a gentleman, his fingers like elongated claws, his corpse-like face attracts as much as it repels. And the shadows: the visualization and movement of shadows in this expressionistic film are as terrifying as his body. There might even be something strangely erotic at work here. A connection exists between sex and death, often implicit in vampire and Dracula stories, and to a degree also apparent in some of Macri’s portraits, but that is beyond my scope here.
When I look at Macri's Vlad, the last thing that comes to mind is bloodletting or a blood-curdling scream. Although the man's serene face doesn’t send shivers of revulsion up and down one’s spine, it may induce anxiety, stimulate cultural curiosity, elicit applause over the artistry, arouse erotic longings, or create a complicated combination of many emotions, depending upon the viewer. There are so many adroitly arranged elements in this portrait that the more I stare at it, the more meaningful the image becomes. Almost marmoreal in appearance, the head suggests an eastern potentate or powerful, quasi-priestly magician, or a mythical animal assuming human form. Despite it’s ability to entice, the portrait also exudes an element of foreboding, perhaps suggested by the claw-like apparatus encircling the jaw line and reaching down to a strange, brown, winged puppet, for want of a better name, which is seemingly held against the chest. A similar kind of artefact is found in other Macri pieces, clearly a motif that he has been developing over a period of time.
The intermingling of flesh with mineral and the merging of human with both animal and inorganic characteristics are fundamental to Macri’s art. As in the brilliantly conceived Dust Roe and Triffid-related work, he doesn’t hesitate to play with monstrosity, if I may use that term, to satirize or shock, to repel or romanticize, even to seduce, or to depict alternative and shifting identities, when it suits his artistic purpose. The associations, therefore, with Vlad Ţepeş are partially helpful, but I don't think the name of the portrait is the only meaning or significance to be found in it.
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| Dust Roe |
The history of art is also the history of imitation and variations. Artists may often choose to imitate another work of art, which itself is a form of admiration. Macri, though, doesn’t imitate the Ţepeş portrait, but portrays his own conception of Vlad, keenly aware of the historical and cultural associations with the man. What I find particularly interesting is how Macri works against stereotype even as he flirts with it. His Vlad is not a standard image of royalty, even if it conveys a sense of sculpture, majestic and seemingly impassive with nary a drop of blood in sight. By redesigning various details of the original portrait like the cap, the hair, the central jewel, and the colouring, Macri creates a compelling and subtle image. He has studied the famous portrait and has, like the cross-cultural transmission of folktales, re-imagined the image of Vlad to create a new kind of story.
As an artist Macri is exceptionally alert to the role of light and shadows in painting and photography, just as the director Murnau understood the role of shadows in Nosferatu. It’s instructive to compare the coloured version of Macri’s portrait with the black and white one to see the extraordinary effect of light and shadow in both. They are not identical portraits, however, as there are significant differences between them (notice, for example, the eyes), but both benefit from Macri’s technical mastery of his medium. The coloured portrait especially suggests a man of unique audacity and authority, a feeling heightened by the shadows out of which he emerges and to which he belongs, despite the preternatural glow and smoothness of his skin, like a mythical demi-god who moves by his own circadian rhythms, indifferent or immune to the passage of time.
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| Ţepeş (production still) |
When I visited Romania ten years ago, I found my way to the old town of Sighișoara (now a UNESCO World Heritage Site) in Transylvania and stood in front of the house where Vlad Ţepeş was born, closed to the public at the time. Just down a way, however, behind the St. Domitian Cathedral, if memory serves, I had my picture taken in front of the statue of Vlad’s head on a pedestal, the sunlight obscuring his visage but angelically highlighting mine. Unlike Macri’s portrait, the enormous head is rough-hewn as if it had been hacked out of stone, the famous moustache prominent, the entire piece reminding me of Rodin’s monumental, unfinished statue of Balzac.
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| Kenneth Radu |
Although Macri surrounds the lower face of Vlad Ţepeş with jagged-shaped, blue metallic accoutrements, suggesting dragon scales, this is not a visage roughly chiselled out of rock. It’s too smooth, like porcelain or alabaster; touched with subtle cosmetics to give a blush of life to the cheeks and with darkly shadowed eyes to heighten a sense of otherworldliness or mystery. And those eyes! Despite their darkness, the eyes are alive with deliberate animal-like focus on whoever or whatever approaches in humble, possibly fearful supplication (the dragon after all) to this ambiguous, potentially dangerous and beautiful majesty.
Kenneth Radu has published books of fiction, poetry and non-fiction, including The Cost of Living, shortlisted for the Governor General's Award. His collection of stories A Private Performance and his first novel Distant Relations both received the Quebec Writers' Federation Award for best English-language fiction. He is also the author of the novel Flesh and Blood (HarperCollins Canada), Sex in Russia: New & Selected Stories, Earthbound and Net Worth (DC Books Canada).
Adamo Macri’s Vlad the Beautiful
Essay by Kenneth Radu - 2021
Narrator: Benjamin Press
