Born in Montreal, Canada, in 1964, Adamo Macri is a multimedia artist whose practice moves freely across sculpture, photography, video, painting, and drawing. He studied commercial art, graphic design, photography, art history, and fine arts at Dawson College, developing a broad visual vocabulary that continues to inform his work. Although Macri is particularly recognized for sculpture and conceptual self-portraiture, his multidisciplinary approach resists easy classification. Across different media, he examines identity, transformation, the body, environmental unease, and the uncertain boundaries separating human beings from other forms of life. His works often combine psychological tension with a sense of the unfamiliar, inviting viewers to question what they see rather than offering immediate explanations. This interest in ambiguity can already be found in his early painting Un, created in 1994, which reveals the beginnings of ideas that would later become central to his artistic practice.
Un, 1994
Oil paint on canvas, 9 × 12 inches
In Un, Macri captures the uncertain moment before an image, idea, or identity fully takes shape. Emerging from a dark and restless surface, the partial profile of a head appears confined within a narrow space. It is recognizable enough to suggest life, yet too ambiguous to be identified with certainty. The form might represent a human being, an unborn creature, a mutant body, or an unfamiliar presence from another world. Macri deliberately keeps its nature unresolved.
The title deepens this ambiguity. As an English prefix, “un” often indicates absence, reversal, or negation, suggesting something unformed, unnamed, or not yet visible. In French, however, un means “one.” This second meaning introduces ideas of singularity, unity, and origin. The title may therefore point simultaneously toward nonexistence and beginning: something that has not yet become, but also the first mark from which everything else may develop.
Although the painting initially appears abstract, the emerging head gives it a subtle figurative tension. Gestural passages of oil paint create a surface that feels active and unsettled. Texture becomes more than a formal quality; it influences the emotional experience of the image. Macri has compared texture to taste buds, describing it as something that shapes perception at an instinctive, sensory level. In Un, the layered surface produces an atmosphere that is tactile, psychological, and almost physical.
The painting recalls aspects of postwar gestural abstraction, including Abstract Expressionism and Tachisme, movements that emphasized spontaneity, intuition, and emotionally charged mark-making. Yet Macri redirects this expansive tradition toward a much more private scale. Rather than confronting the viewer with a monumental canvas, he offers a small, concentrated object that encourages close observation. At only nine by twelve inches, Un feels like a personal fragment, a preserved thought, or a page removed from an intimate visual journal.
Its darkness does not function simply as empty space. Instead, it resembles a psychic chamber in which something is developing. The head appears enclosed within a womb, egg, or protective cocoon. It may be waiting to emerge, or perhaps resisting exposure. The image recalls the arrival of an idea during the night: powerful enough to awaken the mind, but still too fragile and incomplete to be clearly expressed.
The elaborate dark wooden frame strengthens this impression of enclosure. It protects the small image like a reliquary while also restricting it like armour. The framed composition can be experienced as a peephole through which the viewer observes something private and unfinished. Looking becomes an act of curiosity and intrusion. We are drawn toward what has not been fully revealed, even while sensing that it may not be ready to be seen.
Many concerns associated with Macri’s later work are already present here in an embryonic form. His subsequent sculptures, photographs, and video works frequently explore metamorphosis, hybrid bodies, contamination, and the instability of personal identity. In Un, those themes remain quiet and undeveloped, yet unmistakably present. The uncertain figure marks the beginning of a visual language that would continue to evolve across different media.
For Macri, the work has become a personal touchstone, comparable to a private Mona Lisa. Its importance lies less in providing a resolved statement than in preserving the mystery of artistic inception. Macri has described creativity as a meditative and almost spiritual process through which an artwork gradually develops its own autonomy. Viewed from this perspective, Un is not simply a representation of a figure. It is evidence of consciousness in the process of discovering form.
The painting was selected for inclusion in Atlante dell’Arte Contemporanea MoMA by the publication’s scientific committee of curators and art critics. Events connected with the book launch were scheduled for June 5, 2026, at Università eCampus, Sala La Catedral, in Rome, and June 19, 2026, at The Museum of Modern Art in New York. A further presentation is planned for September at Teatro-Libreria Giunti Odeon in Florence.
Three decades after its creation, Un continues to embody the vulnerability and excitement of a beginning. By refusing to complete or define its emerging subject, Macri preserves the tension of “not yet.” The painting asks viewers to remain at the threshold, where an image, an identity, and an entire artistic language are just beginning to appear.
