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| Capo di Monte |
Adamo Macri: Memory, Mutation, and the Living Object
Adamo Macri is an award-winning, Montreal-based multidisciplinary artist whose practice resists categorization. Working fluidly across sculpture, photography, painting, video, and drawing, Macri constructs immersive visual narratives that interrogate identity, contamination, and the fragile balance between nature and the human condition. His work consistently dissolves boundaries between mediums, between object and observer, and most notably between the artist and the artwork itself.
Central to Macri’s approach is the idea that art should be experienced rather than merely viewed. His sculptures are not static artifacts but evolving events, sites of transformation that invite the viewer into a psychological and emotional encounter. By frequently using his own body as a material and subject, Macri embeds personal history directly into his work, making physical change a metaphor for cultural inheritance, memory, and personal evolution.
Origins: Heritage and Formation
Macri completed his studies at Dawson College in Montreal in 1984, where he pursued a hybrid education combining graphic design with fine arts. This dual foundation continues to inform his work, evident in the precision of his compositions and the conceptual rigor behind them.
Born in Canada to Italian immigrants from Serra San Bruno, a medieval town perched high in the mountains of Calabria, Macri grew up navigating multiple identities. As the youngest of four siblings and the only Canadian-born child in his family, he occupied a liminal space, rooted in Southern Italian tradition while simultaneously shaped by North American culture. This duality would later become a recurring undercurrent in his artistic investigations, particularly in his exploration of imitation, belonging, and inherited aesthetics.
Capo di Monte: A Cultural Artifact Reimagined
Created in July 2016, Capo di Monte is a pivotal work within Macri’s oeuvre. Measuring 61 by 61 cm, with a limited edition of four smaller works measuring 31 by 31 cm, the piece draws its name and conceptual framework from Capodimonte porcelain, an iconic tradition originating in Naples between 1743 and 1759.
Historically, Capodimonte porcelain was revered for its ornate figurines, hand-applied floral details, and luminous glaze marked by the fleur-de-lys. These objects symbolized refinement, wealth, and cultural aspiration. Yet as Capodimonte forms were replicated and disseminated globally, they became something else entirely, symbols not just of beauty, but of longing, imitation, and displacement.
Macri’s Capo di Monte does not celebrate porcelain’s elegance uncritically. Instead, it interrogates how these objects transformed once they entered immigrant households, shifting from elite artifacts to mass-produced replicas infused with emotional and cultural weight.
Southern Italian Immigrants and the Language of Imitation
For many Southern Italian immigrants arriving in North America, familiar furniture and decorative objects served as anchors, tangible connections to a homeland left behind. These items offered comfort, continuity, and identity in environments that often felt alien and unforgiving.
However, economic hardship and limited access to original pieces meant that many homes were filled with inexpensive reproductions and low-quality imitations. What emerged was a recognizable aesthetic that was lavish, crowded, ornate, and unapologetically excessive. Nearly every household mirrored the next, distinguished only by minor variations. Imitation became a survival strategy and a collective language spoken through decor.
Macri frames this phenomenon not as a failure of taste, but as a cultural response to displacement. In a new land of boundless promise but limited understanding, imitation offered belonging. This domino effect of sameness created a regional visual identity, one easily stereotyped yet deeply human.
Childhood Neighborhoods and the Birth of Kitsch
Growing up in these immigrant neighborhoods, Macri encountered Capodimonte objects everywhere. Figurines, teacups, vases, chandeliers, biscuit containers, objects that existed purely to be displayed. Homes resembled crowded museums or thrift stores, filled with mismatched furniture from the 1950s and 1970s, yet always dominated by porcelain centerpieces that demanded attention.
As a child, Macri perceived these objects as art, mysterious, intricate, and mesmerizing. Over time, admiration gave way to awareness. The interiors, though intended to evoke grandeur, often felt oppressive and theatrical, striving for a museum-like ideal that remained perpetually out of reach.
This aesthetic aligns with what is commonly described as kitsch, a style embracing sentimentality, excess, and mass production. Kitsch rejects minimalism and elite artistic norms, celebrating boldness, nostalgia, and emotional immediacy. In Macri’s work, kitsch is not dismissed. It is examined as a meaningful cultural expression born from aspiration, memory, and adaptation.
Repercussion Dreams and Subconscious Memory
Macri’s relationship with Capodimonte took a darker turn during adolescence. What once fascinated him began to feel suffocating. He imagined himself trapped in factories, endlessly molding porcelain on conveyor belts, an image of creative stagnation and inherited repetition.
These anxieties manifested in recurring dreams. In them, Macri wanders through a dim, castle-like chamber where a long wooden table is set with ornate porcelain chalices filled with a thick, dark red substance, wine transformed into something resembling blood or paint. The room hums with distant voices, yet he remains unseen, a silent observer drawn to the chalices but never daring to drink.
These dreams encapsulate the tension at the heart of Capo di Monte, desire and revulsion, beauty and decay, heritage and confinement. Today, encountering similar objects, whether in a grandmother’s home or a thrift store, still triggers a visceral response. Nostalgia merges with unease, transforming porcelain into something uncanny.
Art as Living Memory
Through Capo di Monte, Adamo Macri transforms personal history into a universal reflection on identity, inheritance, and the aesthetics of displacement. His work reveals how objects carry emotional residue, how imitation becomes culture, and how memory lingers within material form.
Macri’s art does not offer resolution. Instead, it invites viewers to confront their own inherited narratives and to recognize how beauty, discomfort, and belonging often coexist. In doing so, his work becomes not just an object to observe, but an experience to inhabit, a living archive of transformation.
Capo di Monte, 2016
Photography: Chromogenic C-print
61 x 61 cm
61 x 61 cm
31 x 31 cm
Edition: 4
Edition: 4
