CURATORIAL REVIEW | October 30, 2025
THE POETICS OF DIGITAL MATTER
A dialogue of transformation, memory, and presence
Written by Laura Acosta
The Intimacy of Transformation
What first draws me to Marco Jacconi’s work is the tension between precision and emotion — the way digital language finds its way back into the realm of touch. His works inhabit a delicate threshold where the virtual and the physical dissolve into one another, where light becomes matter and matter turns into light.
Born in Bern to Italian–Moroccan heritage and based in Zurich, Jacconi has developed a visual language that resists easy classification. His surfaces — layered, polished, and scratched — reveal both control and accident, density and fragility. Within this duality, the artist discovers a quiet form of spirituality, one rooted not in transcendence but in the act of transformation itself. Each gesture feels like a conversation between code and pigment, between the intangible and the human.
Marco Jacconi portrait.
Sogni_al_limone_2022.
Close_up
Material Alchemy: From Pixel to Pulse
Jacconi’s process begins in the digital realm, but it never remains there. What starts as a meticulously composed image — shaped through design, photography, or code — undergoes a series of material interventions: resin poured, pigment layered, surface eroded and redefined. The screen becomes a skin, alive with imperfections and traces of touch.
There’s a sense of rebellion in this transformation — a refusal to let technology remain cold or detached. His surfaces reclaim the intimacy of matter. Each layer becomes a memory of what came before, a sedimentation of gestures. Smooth resin meets rough scratches; clarity meets corrosion. The result is not an image, but a body — luminous, fragile, and charged with time.
In works such as Brucia la luna (2023) and Tra il ghiaccio e la luce (2024), light is treated not as an external phenomenon but as a living force. It vibrates from within, revealing how the digital and the organic can share the same pulse. Standing before these works, I sense an almost alchemical dialogue — an effort to give tenderness to technology and density to the invisible.
Brucia_la_luna_2023
l'sola_che_non_cè_2022
The Language of Dualities
His universe thrives on contrast: beauty and grotesque, geometry and erosion, precision and decay. These oppositions don’t seek resolution; they coexist, forming the rhythm of his practice. The compositions feel like meditations on unity — on what happens when opposites merge without losing their difference.
The tactile dimension of his works recalls skin — its ability to record, to age, to remember. Cracks, veins, and abrasions become cartographies of experience, traces of both process and emotion. They remind me that even in a world of algorithms, touch still holds meaning.
There’s also an unspoken mysticism running through his work — a subtle awareness that each material act carries its own spirit. His pieces exist in states of becoming rather than completion, suspended between solidity and dissolution. In that fragile equilibrium, the human pulse meets the digital heartbeat.
L'ultimo_Orizzonte_2023
Process as Revelation
Rather than following a defined plan, his practice unfolds like a conversation with time — patient, cyclical, almost meditative. He builds, erases, waits, and returns. Each work moves through multiple transformations before it feels resolved, though perhaps resolution is never really the goal. This rhythm mirrors memory itself: repetition, distortion, renewal.
The surfaces hold echoes — fragments of images that feel both remembered and invented. A distant landscape, an abstract form, a fleeting vibration of light. These are not representations but reverberations: states of perception materialized.
I often think of his process not as depiction but as revelation — an uncovering that happens through erosion, patience, and listening. To stand before these works is to inhabit a liminal space where clarity blurs into sensation, and the act of seeing becomes an act of feeling.
Tra_il_ghiaccio_e_la luce_2024
Malverde_2020
Resonance and Presence
In a time saturated by images, Jacconi’s work slows perception down. His pieces invite stillness — a proximity that borders on contemplation. They are not meant to be consumed quickly; they are meant to be experienced. Their luminosity carries a physical weight, their silence an emotional density.
I often think of his studio as an alchemical space, a site where emotion becomes texture and technology gains warmth. Each gesture, each layer, carries a kind of faith — in transformation, in persistence, in the possibility of harmony between the artificial and the organic.
Ultimately, Jacconi’s art is not about reconciling opposites but about dwelling within their dialogue. It invites us to sense how the digital can breathe, how matter can remember, how light can feel.
Marco Jacconi. Black, gray and some turquoise.
An Invitation to Perceive the Invisible
What moves me most about Jacconi’s work is its sincerity. There is no irony in his embrace of technology, no distance in his relationship to beauty. He approaches both with attentiveness and openness — trusting that truth can emerge even through constructed images.
To encounter his work is to witness a quiet revelation: that surfaces can hold tenderness, that code can ache, that even in a world built of pixels, something profoundly human endures.
His pieces are not objects of representation but acts of communion — gestures of presence in a time of distance. And perhaps that is the true poetry of digital matter: the way it allows light to remember, and memory to shine.
—Laura Acosta
Curator & Creative Director, Arttyco
Written in Barcelona, October 2025
✉ info@arttyco.com | 🌐 www.arttyco.com | IG: @arttyco
Laura Acosta, Curator and Creative Director at Arttyco, combines her background in architecture, interior design, and cultural management to create accessible and engaging contemporary art experiences. Her multidisciplinary approach emphasizes spatial awareness and deep audience connection.
Karen Shahar (HALAS), Infinity Unfolds. Challah as ritual, memory, and sacred gesture.
Photographic fragments stitched into a sculptural body of memory and multiplicity.
The central structure anchoring the exhibition with visual and conceptual gravity.
