by Christos Zampounis

He arrived on the small Cycladic island where I spend my summer vacation. His first gesture was to introduce us to his newborn child, Tiberius. The second was to share with us, through his phone, photographs from his exhibition in Capri. The third, once we sat at the table, was to give us a brief historical review of the relationship between the Roman Emperor Tiberius and the popular island of the Tyrrhenian Sea. It was there that Tiberius settled and built the famed Villa Jovis—literally the Villa of Zeus. From there he governed his vast empire, under the constant “fear of the Jews,” as he called his political adversaries conspiring against him in Rome. Capri was chosen by the South African artist Conor Mccreedy as the setting for his new collection of works, titled Imperial Blues. As the first word suggests, these are oil portraits of Roman emperors, which, however, are also offered in digital form with blockchain authentication. The latter version is of particular interest, as it employs Artificial Intelligence to animate the faces—reviving these historical figures with dynamic expressions and movements, as the artist himself explains. The exhibition opened on August 1st of this year at the Certosa, a 14th-century monastery that, since 2024, has housed the island’s new Archaeological Museum. Destination Capri: Conor Mccreedy, Emperor Oil Paintings, August 1 – October 15, 2025.

P.S. Blue is Conor’s signature color—a “state of being,” an existential condition, as he himself describes it.