Jakub Czyszczo – Ghost Software

Comunicato stampa

DISPLAY
Vicolo al Leon D’Oro 4/A,
43121 Parma
[email protected]
http://www.spaziodisplay.com

11.07.2026 – 30.08.2026 (by appointment only)
OPENING 11.07.2026 h 19:00

Jakub Czyszczoń
Ghost Software

Painting and clothing are ambivalent media: both “make bodies” through surfaces that cover, figure and let them appear. In Czyszczoń’s works, the framed image loosens its boundaries and moves outward, while a shirt, stripped of its function, becomes a broken architecture for an absent body. Moving between garment, painting and object, he enacts a form of organic evocation, gathering clues, folds, seams, stains and voids; deconstructed shirt-forms and garment fragments mounted on the wall like partial shrouds, infuse the space with an uncanny tenderness. A silent cruelty clings to clothes that have been worn and then discarded, still charged with the intimacy of the body and with the social codes once imposed upon it. Garments dress the body into roles, gestures, hierarchies and forms of social visibility. Czyszczoń recovers these familiar codes and unsettles them through cuts, stains, stitches and exposure. What was once a surface of social appearance becomes an injured support, handled with a care that borders on aggression, where contact continues to work through absence.

How fragile exposure makes us.
What ghosts we become to one another when we disappear and leave traces of ourselves on the things that touched us.
A shirt collar now resembles your mouth, a chasm, the edge of a wound; the sleeves fall like your tired arms at the end of the day. It is your body losing its hold.
Now, split the word software in two. Think of it first as an invisible programme operating inside an electric body, then read the word as soft/wear – something soft to be worn, a second skin. Garments are software too: they configure the body’s form, hold its outline, and instruct its public appearance; they continue to work after the body has gone, inscribing a code of contact through which absence takes form. Within this spectro-technological imaginary of fabric and ghosts, Jakub’s works bring me back to Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s controversial late nineteenth-century novel L’Ève future, built around the mythologised figure of Thomas Alva Edison, here portrayed as an electric magician. Edison creates Hadaly, an electromagnetic creature assembled as a surrogate for the woman desired by Lord Ewald: a body composed through artifice, designed to bridge the gap between desire and the perceived imperfection of its living model.
Seen through this fiction, Czyszczoń’s works shift the question of artificial presence into a more fragile, more soiled, more materially bound register. Combining painting and garment, fabric and clay, metal wires and altered plants, seams and lacerations, he lets traces of former lives emerge from matter, drawing together a constellation of surfaces that continue to behave as if a real body might return. These are bodies without bodies, held together by traces and remnants of contact. A minor technology of presence unfolds: tactile, unstable and spectral, a way of haunting space.
—Ilaria Monti
__________
Jakub Czyszczoń (b. 1993) lives and works in Poland. His practice explores the nature and circulation of images through painting, objects, prints, and installations. Selected exhibitions: “Adaptation” at Marcel Alix, Paris, 2026. “Gifts of Friendship”, Museum of Art in Łódź, 2026. “Interior Excess”, Stereo, Warsaw, 2025. “SPLEEN”, Piekary Gallery, Poznań, 2024. “Clavicle” at Ermes-Ermes, Rome, 2023/2022. “Side Effects” with Tilde Greene, Stereo, Warsaw, 2022. “Confines” with Alexi Ketuta-Meskhishvili curated by Camila McHugh, JUNE, Berlin, 2022. “Pocket Knife Instead of The Alphabet", Stereo, Warsaw, 2020/2021. “Volume of Effort (3)”, Skala Gallery in Poznań, 2020. “Late echo”, Stereo Gallery, Warsaw, 2018. Solo presentation at LISTE in Basel and NADA in New York, 2018. “Micrograms”, Ermes-Ermes Gallery, Rome, 2017. “Is the room full of smoke?”, Galeria Stereo, Warsaw, 2017. “The Eye Wants to Sleep, But The Head Is Not a Mattress”, BWA Contemporary Art Gallery in Katowice 2015.
_________
Co-financed by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage of the Republic of Poland and the Adam Mickiewicz Institute.