Diego Marcon (b. Busto Arsizio, Italy, 1985) blends filmmaking techniques and tools like CGI, prosthetics, and robotics to create moving images that feel artificial, yet strangely alive. He explores emotional ambiguities and blurs moral boundaries by drawing from traditional genres like musicals, horror, cartoons, and Italian opera. In his first solo exhibition in Canada, Marcon presents four films that are at once unsettling and tender.

Often working with a small team of close collaborators, Marcon composes every aspect of his films—from set and lighting to costume, sound, and script—playing with familiar tropes from the golden age of cartoons and Italian opera while subtly unmooring them from expectation. Looping and emotionally heightened repetition push his work into disquieting emotional territory. Oscillating between the grotesque and the humorous, Marcon’s films compel viewers to confront empathy, unease, cruelty, and contradiction all at once.

For his exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Marcon presents four films. Three of the central works unfold within the family home, transforming spaces of familiarity into sites of uncanny tension. The Parents’ Room stages a chilling musical confession, Dolle captures a family of moles trapped in an obsessive cycle of calculation, and Krapfen, Marcon’s newest film, transforms a kid’s refusal to eat an apricot-jam doughnut into a surreal musical choreography of invisible tormentors. Presented together, these works form a constellation of looping scenes in which tenderness, absurdity, and melancholy circulate without resolution.

The exhibition begins with an earlier work, Untitled (Head Falling) is a short camera-less animation in which a head repeatedly drops, dangles, and returns to its starting point. Installed in the museum’s corridor of European and Canadian paintings, the work offers a dialogue between the AGO’s historical collection and Marcon’s contemporary films. The Bubble Boy (1884) by Canadian figure painter Paul Peel, is moved from the hallway into Marcon’s exhibition. This exchange creates a quiet dialogue between the historical paintings of the AGO’s collection and Marcon’s cinematic figures.

Peel’s inclusion in the exhibition also marks the importance of children and childhood as charged subjects in Marcon’s practice. While Peel’s painting evokes wonder and joy, Marcon’s films introduce a more anxious and vulnerable register. Placed in proximity, these images of childhood reveal both the light-hearted playfulness of childhood with the macabre affect that Marcon’s works also invoke. Presented together, Marcon’s works resist closure. They loop and return, echoing the unresolved dramas and strange repetitions of the human condition. There are no answers here—only cycles of ambiguity, tenderness, and the eerie familiarity of it all.

The exhibition is organized by the Art Gallery of Ontario and The Vega Foundation. It is co-curated by John Zeppetelli and Julia Paoli, Director and Curator, with Kate Whiteway, Assistant Curator, The Vega Foundation.

Krapfen is co-commissioned and made possible by Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Lafayette Anticipations, New Museum, the Renaissance Society, and The Vega Foundation with additional support from Sadie Coles HQ, London, and Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne/New York.