Adamo Macri
We think of the alluring statuary of classical Greece from which we derive our ideals of physical beauty, of human shape and proportions, confronted by its antithesis, the freakish which break down the classic norms of size, shape, texture, the perfect physique. Does the freak both repel and fascinate because he violates our standard views of correct appearance, of the body beautiful? Does a kind of ironic beauty emerge through the smog and noxious atmosphere of contemporary life? Macri ranges very far with an often restricted pallet and often focuses on minute details; for example, in the accumulated encrustations on a drain pipe, potentially disgusting, yet effectively beautiful, however strange. It seems to be an image of bubbling corrosion, but from an entirely different perspective it’s a depiction of life emergent in obscurity, life at the cellular level as the artist in his acute and fine perception sees it.
Macri’s art is not representational in the commonly understood sense of the term, even if a drain pipe can be recognized. Because he makes free and imaginative use of all media available to him, his art infiltrates the imagination and penetrates dull perception for the purposes of transformation. What might seem to be images of chaos is really a subtly organized illumination of vibrant cellular activity. Macri does not wander into pure abstraction, for his work is as much welded to the concrete of the organic and the metallic as it the nebulous world of emotions, intimations and erotic impulses. For all its radical shifting of the banal and the expected, he is very interested in flesh and blood on various levels. Consequently, his work contains a kind of quivering, or may induce that kind of response in the viewer sensitive to his vision, a fleshy response if there ever was one. Broadly speaking without pointing to a specific image, Macri’s collective body of work can merge into and become inextricable from the viewer’s own flesh and blood.
Prolonged exposure to the riveting details of his images leads to their becoming fixed in the mind which produces a curious desire to see more. For cells by nature proliferate and in the act of stirring may well mutate, become something else, or engender more of their kind. Life is happening at the cellular level in his art which explains the orgasmic burgeoning effect of the implications in Adamo Macri’s images. He builds upon physiological facts and creates a vision derived from the unobserved and disregarded microcosms surrounding us, imbuing them with the eroticism of swiftly moving lines, curves and muscle, hidden energy and overt power. The phenomenon of unimpeded growth and the power of possession, whorling and curling, which almost reflects the structure of the brain itself, or the unfurling of the seed, the ejaculation of a life force.
The structural basis to many of the Still Life images often depend upon the recurrence of similar forms. They create an intriguing melding between the organic and inorganic, between inert metal made alive by encrustations of cellular energy, between electricity and flesh, as if re-creating life forms. So, how interesting that the name of the artist is Adamo, given to him at birth and not later adopted, which means dust, the very beginning of life, mythologically speaking. The name reminds us that the artist has entered the world of microcosms to see what is there and how it embodies life in the process of beginning. From obsession with the minuscule, Macri looms large and the images collectively depict the poetry of burgeoning. He is aware, to revert to a Romantic conception of the origins of life, of electricity charging the very cell of things.
An excerpt from Cellular Excitement: An Appreciation of the Art of Adamo Macri by Kenneth Radu.
