Writing Contact
When I Look in the Mirror, I See Only a Sheet of Skin → Curatorial collaboration with Cezary Rucki on a solo exhibition at the Rucki Studio
2026
The project focused on developing the curatorial framework of the exhibition and producing an accompanying text contextualising the artist's practice for the solo exhibition When I Look in the Mirror, I See Only the Surface of My Skin.
How can we speak about emotions that elude language? In what ways can photography become a tool for self-reflection and confronting one's own psychological states? How can the image mediate experiences that remain invisible, difficult, or impossible to articulate?
When I Look in the Mirror, I See Only the Surface of My Skin explores the relationship between emotion, corporeality, and processes of the inner transformation. Working with photography as a point of departure, the artist investigates and visualises experiences that resist verbal expression. By expanding the photographic medium through sculpture, painting, and performative gestures, personal emotional states are translated into layered images and sculptural forms.
The exhibition invites viewers to reflect on the connections between body, emotion, and representation, while considering the ways in which artistic practice can make visible what often remains beneath the surface - experiences that are felt rather than seen, and sensed rather than named.
How can we speak about emotions that elude language? In what ways can photography become a tool for self-reflection and confronting one's own psychological states? How can the image mediate experiences that remain invisible, difficult, or impossible to articulate?
When I Look in the Mirror, I See Only the Surface of My Skin explores the relationship between emotion, corporeality, and processes of the inner transformation. Working with photography as a point of departure, the artist investigates and visualises experiences that resist verbal expression. By expanding the photographic medium through sculpture, painting, and performative gestures, personal emotional states are translated into layered images and sculptural forms.
The exhibition invites viewers to reflect on the connections between body, emotion, and representation, while considering the ways in which artistic practice can make visible what often remains beneath the surface - experiences that are felt rather than seen, and sensed rather than named.
photos Cezary Rucki
When I Look in the Mirror, I See Only a Sheet of Skin | Cezary Rucki
July 15 – July 30, 2026
A dense, tangled cloud of grey smoke, somewhere between cigarettes. The kind that rises above our heads in those moments when we no longer know what to do with ourselves.
That is where my imagination takes me when I think of Cezary, who emerged into my life from the haze of grey London. A winter evening, just before dusk, the cool colours of a sunset that looked more like a sunrise, damp dew condensing on the concrete facade of the Royal College of Art. A few days later, I found myself in his modest corner of the Photography Department. Slowly, he began clearing the clouds of smoke in front of me, laying out his emotions across two small, crooked white walls typical of an art school. I like that moment when the mind of someone you have only just met suddenly unfolds before you through a handful of images, phrases, and attempts to give form to the immaterial.
Cezary’s practice centres on the experience of reality. His works translate emotional states, offering a distinctly subjective interpretation of them. He analyses different emotional conditions, giving them physical form and attempting to animate them. He tames them, questions them, processes them, reflects on them. How do emotions manifest themselves in our bodies? Are they visible? When and how does this happen? Do our emotional states become inscribed in our bodies, leaving traces that remain with us forever?
The turn towards the body marks the discovery of a tool through which to tell stories about what is often difficult to express in words. In his practice, he works with the bodies of others (as in one of his earliest series, All Is Well), but also and increasingly in later works with his own body. The recurring image of the artist throughout different series retains a universal quality in its representation of corporeality. As a result, the viewer’s attention is directed towards the interventions within the composition, the work’s materiality, and its final form. Cezary treats photography as a point of departure for sculptural, painterly, and performative interventions, inviting viewers to empathise, to recognise a fragment of themselves within the works, or simply to observe.
When I Look in the Mirror, I See Only a Sheet of Skin is an exhibition about what is not always visible, not always easy, and not always possible to name.
July 15 – July 30, 2026
A dense, tangled cloud of grey smoke, somewhere between cigarettes. The kind that rises above our heads in those moments when we no longer know what to do with ourselves.
That is where my imagination takes me when I think of Cezary, who emerged into my life from the haze of grey London. A winter evening, just before dusk, the cool colours of a sunset that looked more like a sunrise, damp dew condensing on the concrete facade of the Royal College of Art. A few days later, I found myself in his modest corner of the Photography Department. Slowly, he began clearing the clouds of smoke in front of me, laying out his emotions across two small, crooked white walls typical of an art school. I like that moment when the mind of someone you have only just met suddenly unfolds before you through a handful of images, phrases, and attempts to give form to the immaterial.
Cezary’s practice centres on the experience of reality. His works translate emotional states, offering a distinctly subjective interpretation of them. He analyses different emotional conditions, giving them physical form and attempting to animate them. He tames them, questions them, processes them, reflects on them. How do emotions manifest themselves in our bodies? Are they visible? When and how does this happen? Do our emotional states become inscribed in our bodies, leaving traces that remain with us forever?
The turn towards the body marks the discovery of a tool through which to tell stories about what is often difficult to express in words. In his practice, he works with the bodies of others (as in one of his earliest series, All Is Well), but also and increasingly in later works with his own body. The recurring image of the artist throughout different series retains a universal quality in its representation of corporeality. As a result, the viewer’s attention is directed towards the interventions within the composition, the work’s materiality, and its final form. Cezary treats photography as a point of departure for sculptural, painterly, and performative interventions, inviting viewers to empathise, to recognise a fragment of themselves within the works, or simply to observe.
When I Look in the Mirror, I See Only a Sheet of Skin is an exhibition about what is not always visible, not always easy, and not always possible to name.