Pani Domu Presents Kamil Kukla's Silva in Poznań

Pani Domu presents Silva by Kamil Kukla, curated by Krzysztof Mętel and Mateusz Piestrak, through 17 May 2026.

A wall does not usually get to keep its history showing. Here the plaster is stripped back on purpose, layer after layer of paint left visible like rings in a felled trunk. The room remembers being other rooms before it became a gallery.

Somewhere behind that wall, or perhaps just behind the paintings hung against it, a text keeps insisting that everything a body takes in comes back up undigested. Film, refuse, paper, plastic. What a forest absorbs it does not always break down. It rearranges the debris into something that looks, from a distance, like growth.

The forest in these paintings is not a retreat from the built world. It is where the built world goes to keep decomposing in a shape it can still recognize.

Pani Domu is a private, artist-run gallery inside a former apartment in Poznań, kept by Mateusz Piestrak and Krzysztof Mętel. The rooms were not restored for the occasion. Walls sit half-stripped to mustard-yellow undercoat, a white-tiled stove still stands in one corner.

Kukla's paintings and floor sculptures live inside this unfinished shell rather than a neutral field, so the room's decay becomes part of the argument before any canvas does.

"Cover" places an open book at the center of a scorched, dusk-colored clearing, its pages the same teal as the still water beneath it. A cropped arm, ringed like a branch, holds the spine open against a red trunk that could be bark or muscle.

Thin diagonal lines cut the sky like static, the kind of mark a stylus leaves rather than a brush. The painting will not resolve whether it shows a landscape being read or a text turning back into terrain.

In "Reclining," dark hair spreads across the canvas the way current spreads sediment, hard to tell where the strands end and the water's reflection begins. The body attached to that hair stays mostly withheld, cropped low, so what remains legible is the pattern the hair makes rather than the person it belongs to.

On the floor, an untitled cast body knots into a shape closer to a root system than a torso, its surface pitted in iridescent purple and bronze. Unlike the wall around it, this material will not actually rot. It performs the look of erosion, holes fixed permanently into polystyrene and gypsum, a wound already stopped changing.

"Wood," "Ewa," "Pit," and the gouaches carry the same logic into smaller formats. Hooves folding into branches, a diver's body inverted into a pond the color of a dying sky, a red furrow cut so dark it reads as absence before it reads as grass.

Kukla's wall text, translated from Polish by Soren Gauger, describes a wood clogged with rubber and plastic that a body ingests and vomits back up, as if it had never been there.

That image lands differently now, when what passes through a person daily is mostly footage, not food. Baudelaire's "Correspondances," quoted alongside the paintings, once proposed nature as a temple of symbols watching us. Kukla's forest still watches. It has stopped being patient.

By the room with the stove, the paint has flaked to bare plaster in a shape close to the wound on the sculpture across from it. Nobody arranged that resemblance.

The room got there on its own, on the same schedule as everything inside it now asked to look wounded and permanent at once.

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