Born in Montreal, Canada, in 1964, Adamo Macri is a multimedia artist whose creative scope stretches beyond convention. A graduate of Dawson College, his studies in commercial art, graphic design, photography, art history, and fine arts gave him a foundation that seamlessly merges technique and intuition. Though sculpture anchors much of his artistic identity, his practice expands into photography, video, painting, and drawing—each medium an exploration of transformation, perception, and the fragile tension between illusion and truth. Macri’s work is not concerned with comfort or surface beauty; instead, it searches the interior landscapes of experience. His art feels like a descent into consciousness, stripping away the visible to reveal what stirs beneath. Isolation, renewal, and duality echo through his visual language, where beauty often resides in unease and discovery begins where certainty ends.
Mariana Trench (2025)
Medium: Photography
Size: 76 x 84 cm
In Mariana Trench, Macri ventures into one of Earth’s most haunting frontiers—the deepest oceanic abyss known to humankind. Stretching nearly eleven kilometers beneath the surface of the Pacific, the trench becomes a metaphor for the psyche itself—dark, pressurized, and uncharted. Through photography, Macri turns this natural phenomenon into an inward excavation. His vision imagines ghostly lifeforms—bioluminescent hybrids and the mysterious “Abyssalisian sapiens”—emerging in places untouched by light. These beings, luminous and alien, reflect life’s persistence under impossible conditions.
The work, though mythic, is rooted in personal truth. Macri has spoken openly about his phobias—claustrophobia, fear of heights, deep water, and confinement. In Mariana Trench, these fears are not hidden; they’re transformed. The ocean becomes a metaphor for what the mind conceals—its unspoken pressures and the dissolution of identity under emotional weight. What begins as a geological image expands into a portrait of internal struggle and survival.
A quiet ecological message also runs through the piece. Macri notes that even the trench—Earth’s remotest sanctuary—bears human scars: a discarded plastic bag lies nearly 11,000 meters deep, a symbol of both human reach and irresponsibility. The image balances awe with lamentation. Nature’s endurance contrasts sharply with human neglect, its depths turned into both cathedral and grave.
Macri’s inclusion of Queen Mariana of Austria and Velázquez’s portrait of her adds an unexpected layer. The disciplined grandeur of the queen’s image collides with the primal energy of the imagined sea creature. One represents control and formality; the other, evolution and survival. His creature, fluid and genderless, transcends boundaries, existing as pure adaptation—a reflection of nature’s resilience and the artist’s fascination with transformation.
Ultimately, Mariana Trench is less about the sea than about perception. It questions where “reality” ends and imagination begins. For Macri, those lines blur—what we fear, invent, or dream might be truer than what we claim to know. The photograph becomes a meditation on endurance and perception, on beauty discovered where light refuses to reach.
Adieu Henriette (2025)
Medium: Photography
Size: 76 x 84 cm
Where Mariana Trench delves into the abyss, Adieu Henriette lingers on emotional departure. Inspired by Giacomo Casanova’s brief but consuming affair with a woman named Henriette, Macri reinterprets the story not through seduction but separation. Henriette—an educated, independent woman fleeing an oppressive marriage—embodied autonomy in an era that denied it. When she left Casanova, she shattered his illusion of control. Her exit, rather than his conquest, becomes the emotional nucleus of the piece.
Macri transforms this historical anecdote into a study of loss and realization. Adieu Henriette captures the quiet ache that follows an ending—the still space between attachment and release. The photograph’s subdued tones and restrained composition suggest not despair, but reflection. It is heartbreak distilled into calm awareness. Through it, Macri explores love as both confinement and liberation—how emotional bonds can both elevate and imprison.
Casanova’s later imprisonment under “The Leads” in Venice echoes symbolically through the image. His literal captivity mirrors the emotional imprisonment that follows love’s departure. In Adieu Henriette, the artist suggests that freedom often begins with loss, that parting can be its own form of clarity.
Suspended between time and memory, the photograph carries a quiet grace. It resists melodrama; its strength lies in what remains unspoken. Love, for Macri, is not permanent—it is a continuum of transformations. What begins in passion ends in understanding. The work captures that moment when grief softens into acceptance, when the heart realizes that even loss has meaning.
Together, Mariana Trench and Adieu Henriette trace two sides of the same descent—the plunge into darkness and the release from attachment. Adamo Macri moves seamlessly between the external and the internal, between the ocean’s abyss and the mind’s hidden chambers. His art does not seek comfort; it seeks truth. And within that truth—raw, quiet, and profound—he finds a strange kind of light.
