The Brooklyn Rail

Walking into Rafael Domenech’s exhibition, Prologue: Residual Images in Italics, a dramatic transformation immediately confronts us. The exhibition unfolds like a metaphysical passage through an experiential labyrinth where books become architecture and pages transform into corridors. Above us towers an expansive, mechanically carved black ceiling—a powerful, imposing structure that radically redefines the gallery. This canopy, both solemn and strange with its matte black surface and intricate markings, undermines our expectations of the white-cube experience.

The ceiling, both oppressive and expansive, spans the gallery like a dark, imposing sky. Salvaged from Domenech’s studio—transformed CNC cutter desks—it becomes a galactic map overhead. The layered machine-made etchings—residual marks from previous works—evoke the spontaneous touch of an artist’s sketchbook, revealing raw plywood beneath the matte black surface.

Known for his public pavilions and large-scale architectural interventions that intersect with publishing methodologies—cutting, redacting, quoting, revising, and circulation— Domenech treats the exhibition model as an active opportunity for production. Each element of his installation is an architectural poem, a book in the expanded field, or as Natalia Zuluaga describes, “books-cum-architecture and geology-cum-books.”

His wall-mounted hybrid objects are a genre unto themselves, existing between sculpture, book, assemblage, and architecture, and challenging our own standpoint as viewers. These enigmatic works demand closer inspection—evoking Vladimir Tatlin’s counter-reliefs while expressing contemporary fragmentary image circulation and the ambivalence of commodifying form. They feel like artifacts of an industrial culture on the brink of obsolescence, where surplus is interrogated rather than glorified, questioning the processes of meaning-making and value.

Domenech reveals subjective processes embedded in each edge and cut. His approach to materiality is deliberate, drawing on surpluses from factory, construction, or studio—not as mere byproducts but as materials latent with potential. While his creations emerge from the surplus and detritus of capitalist production, they transcend mere commodity status, becoming forms of cultural criticism that preserve the idea of art. His assemblages—sculptural poems of labor and material—force us to confront the contradictions of material production, artistic value, and commodified labor through the dissonance between craft and technology.

In one piece, a laser-cut plywood text declares I only own my capacity to work (2024), paired with a found book on Renaissance master Raphael and opened to a text discussing the painter’s sketches of the Madonna. This juxtaposition conjures the ideal of artistic freedom through labor, recalling a moment in time when artists transitioned to the production of commodities during the Renaissance. As “a portrait of sorts,” Domenech's studio labor reflects this evolution—from newfound independence from religious dictates to contemporary pressures imposed by the art market and institutional demands. This transformation turns the studio into a semi-industrial production zone where external demands mediate creation. Yet, the paradox remains: the commodification of art, while constraining, also historically enabled artistic freedom—a dynamic that persists today.

Navigating Domenech’s repurposed materials, where egg crates and concrete rocks emerge organically from cutout forms, we encounter not only aestheticized objects but layered histories embodying physical, mental, and societal labor—the artist as anthropologist. This recalls Walter Benjamin’s insight that “there is no document of culture which is not at the same time a document of barbarism,” suggesting that Domenech's works embody the contradictions of cultural creation amid societal decay, pleading for redemption.

Throughout the installation, fragmented phrases—“manicured astroturf,” “dissonant sunsets,” “a sermon of situational ethics”—and titles like flowers bloomed on acid and poems of insomnia act as cryptic guides, enigmas evoking a world overwhelmed by information and ambivalent about meaning. Domenech offers what could be postmodernism’s most mature statement, pushing beyond fragments to evoke an open-ended labyrinthine experience with no clear narrative.

At Andrew Reed Gallery, Domenech’s hybrid objects are contemplative tools challenging us to reflect on the commodification of labor, art, and meaning. In a time marked by the commodification of every creative gesture, he reclaims the studio as both a site of alienation and freedom—a space for potential new configurations emerging from the detritus of everyday life. By confronting this paradox head-on, his work preserves the idea of art while attempting to subvert its manifestation as mere commodity.

Ultimately, Domenech’s work compels us to confront the question: can this barbarism be redeemed? His installation, bearing witness to the artist's persistence amidst the ruins of late capitalism, offers a visceral and resounding YES.