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| Male Head with Gloves |
Male Head with Gloves is featured in the March issue of Artistcloseup Contemporary Art Magazine and the subject matter of an article by Showcase My Art.
Adamo Macri is a Montreal-based contemporary artist. The merging and blurring of the artist and the art with the way spectators experience it is a common interpretation of his work. A para-social relationship is given a new depth by this entwined bond.
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In many of his works, Macri integrates his own image or body, turning himself into both subject and medium. His self-transformations are not acts of vanity but of inquiry. Through them, he investigates how identity can be molded, masked, or even dissolved. He becomes, in effect, part of the sculpture, simultaneously the artist, the material, and the message.
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| Artistcloseup Contemporary Art Magazine |
Adamo Macri: The Alchemy of Identity and Transformation
Adamo Macri is a Montreal-based multimedia artist whose creative reach spans sculpture, photography, painting, video, and drawing. His practice is defined by its deep conceptual rigor and a fascination with the fluidity of identity. Working at the intersection of multiple mediums, Macri blurs the boundaries between object and self, reality and performance. For him, art is not confined to the material; it’s an occurrence, a lived and evolving experience that extends beyond the surface of the work.
Macri’s background in diverse artistic disciplines allows him to explore form, texture, and narrative in unconventional ways. Rather than viewing sculpture as a static creation, he perceives it as an event, a happening that unfolds through time and perception. This idea of art as an occurrence is central to his philosophy. It expands the definition of sculpture to include not just the physical object, but also the gestures, transformations, and human presence that surround its creation.
Identity, Contamination, and the Staging of Nature
Themes of identity and transformation permeate Macri’s oeuvre. His works often question the stability of selfhood, portraying identity as a layered, fluid, and sometimes contaminated construct. The notion of “contamination” in his art is not negative; it’s a metaphor for fusion and evolution, where materials, concepts, and personas intermingle.
By staging nature within controlled or artificial environments, Macri examines the human impulse to curate and reframe the organic world. In doing so, he invites viewers to consider how authenticity and artifice coexist within both natural and human domains. This constant negotiation between what is real and what is constructed becomes the heartbeat of his creative practice.
In many of his works, Macri integrates his own image or body, turning himself into both subject and medium. His self-transformations are not acts of vanity but of inquiry. Through them, he investigates how identity can be molded, masked, or even dissolved. He becomes, in effect, part of the sculpture, simultaneously the artist, the material, and the message.
The Work: Male Head with Gloves
Among Macri’s compelling pieces, Male Head with Gloves (2024) stands as a striking embodiment of his artistic philosophy. At first glance, the work appears to be a portrait of a man framed by his own hands. But a deeper look reveals something far more complex: a dialogue between the human and the primal, the refined and the feral.
The piece captures Macri’s face in an intense, almost otherworldly gaze. His eyes, sharp, intelligent, and searching, seem to pierce the veil between viewer and subject. There’s no passive observation here; his expression compels engagement. It’s the gaze of an artist who not only sees the world but understands its hidden mechanics, its fragile masks and raw truths.
The hands that surround his head are dark, elongated, and almost claw-like. They frame his face not as adornment but as transformation. They are the instruments of both creation and metamorphosis, hands that sculpt and hands that become the sculpted. Their positioning suggests a moment of becoming, where the human form transitions toward something untamed, something elemental.
This gesture embodies the tension at the core of Macri’s work: the collision between control and instinct. The artist stands poised between civility and wilderness, intellect and emotion, beauty and distortion. In Male Head with Gloves, this duality is rendered in haunting visual contrasts, the pale, sculptural face against the darkness of the hands. It’s a study in opposites, a meditation on balance, and an invitation to confront the multifaceted nature of being.
The Artist as Both Creator and Creature
What makes Male Head with Gloves extraordinary is how it collapses the divide between the maker and the made. Macri does not merely represent transformation; he enacts it. His body becomes a vessel for metaphor, his image a theater where identity performs its endless variations.
In this sense, the artwork transcends portraiture. It becomes an embodiment of Macri’s philosophy that art is a living organism, shifting, self-aware, and inseparable from its creator. The work pulses with an energy that feels both personal and universal. We recognize in it our own struggles with duality, the desire for control and the pull of instinct, the need for individuality, and the inevitability of change.
Macri’s creative process is a kind of alchemy. He transforms not only materials but also meanings, converting the physical into the psychological, the tangible into the symbolic. His art doesn’t seek to imitate beauty; it redefines it. It asks us to look beyond surfaces and see beauty in evolution, in imperfection, in the act of becoming.
A Carefully Curated Anthology of Tales
Across his body of work, Adamo Macri constructs what might be called a visual anthology a collection of stories that blur boundaries between inner and outer worlds. Each piece feels like a fragment of a larger narrative, one that reflects on identity as both performance and truth. His self-portraits and sculptural compositions read like mythic chapters from a personal mythology, where human experience is staged, dissected, and reborn.
What unites these works is their sincerity of exploration. Macri’s art never settles for mere aesthetics; it demands emotional and intellectual participation. It invites viewers to step into the liminal space between art and life, where observation becomes transformation.
Conclusion: Becoming the Art
In Male Head with Gloves, Adamo Macri achieves something rare: he dissolves the border between creator and creation. The result is not simply a portrait of a man, but a meditation on the act of being itself. Through shadow and light, through gesture and gaze, he reveals the timeless tension between what we are and what we might become.
For Macri, art is not an object to be admired but a state of existence to be entered. In his world, identity is a fluid construct, constantly reshaped by perception and time. Male Head with Gloves stands as a powerful testament to that vision, a haunting, hypnotic invitation to witness the human condition in perpetual metamorphosis.
Adamo Macri: The Alchemy of Identity and Transformation
Published October 23, 2025
Showcase My Art by Caroline Margaret
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“Bravo.. strong.. cautiously inviting.”
~ John Felice Ceprano (Ottawa rock sculptor, painter)
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"So dark. And. Evil. Amazing artist."
~ Arfawi Noir (Master's degree Private Law, Tunisia)
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“Wow! One of my personal favourites!”
~ Yorgos Papadopoulos (Psychologist, Dráma Greece)
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"You're fabulous and giving me chills!"
~ Wylie Wong (Fine art dealer)
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"Mysterious and a bit frightening.. sends shivers up my spine - brilliant!"
~ Theresa Pope Church (American scientist)
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"Diabolical, the pale face, the black claws. Frightening yet alluring at the same time. Fascinating!"
~ Anton Lechner (Visual artist)
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"I find it intriguing how the black fingers have a life of their own, almost separate from the figure peering through them.. among other features of this remarkable portrait."
~ Kenneth Radu (Canadian writer)
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"Great photo, high drama meets spooky meets high style! Very cool."
~ Steve Goss (Fashion Designer, Shoe Designer, Christian Dior)
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“Interesting artwork Adamo, always surprising the audience with both: evil or angel.”
~ Petra Mattes (Artist, Rottenburg Germany)
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"Adamo’s Male Head with Gloves is more than just a portrait—it’s a manifestation of his essence, his ability to shape-shift between the real and the surreal. Knowing him, I don’t just see an image; I see a part of his soul woven into every detail. His gaze is piercing, almost predatory, not in menace but in the way a creature of instinct and wisdom watches—seeing beyond, understanding what lies beneath.
His hands, dark and elongated like claws, don’t just frame his face; they transform him. There’s something primal in their movement, as if he’s mid-metamorphosis—part human, part something untamed. It’s a gesture both powerful and vulnerable, a moment where control and wildness collide. Adamo has always had this uncanny ability to embody both—the elegance of an artist and the raw energy of something more elemental, something unbound.
The contrast between his pale, sculptural skin and the darkness of his hands creates a haunting duality, one that lingers like a whispered secret. He is both the creator and the creature, the mask and the one who wears it.
This isn’t just a portrait—it’s a glimpse into the mind of someone who doesn’t just make art, but becomes it. Adamo doesn’t imitate beauty; he transforms it, redefines it, makes it his own. And in doing so, he invites us into a world where identity, perception, and instinct blur into something hypnotic and unforgettable."
~ Rosie S. (Administrative Management, Vanier College)
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"Nosferatu on Sunset Blvd."
~ Michael K Waterman (Multi-media artist, New York, Savannah Georgia)
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Artistcloseup Contemporary Art Magazine
#28 March 2025
Male Head with Gloves, 2024
Photography: Chromogenic C-print
86 x 81 x 3 cm
