The Brooklyn Rail

Polish artist Jan Baracz's twilight mechanics, curated by Izabela Gola, places Baracz within the readymade tradition of Marcel Duchamp, Ben Vautier, Bernar Venet, and Marcel Broodthaers. Some of Baracz’s works are more orthodoxly Duchampian while his assemblages and suite of prosaic rectangular plywood panels, bathed in corrosive black washes and marked by plastic husks, fragmentary molding, and metal hardware pieces traipse along the very pictorial ambiguities that Duchamp sought to avoid. The exhibition is rife with conceptual riches and one of the best readymade shows I have had the pleasure to see.

As one approaches the show from its Monroe Street entrance, the viewer sees the window installation, SHADOWS OF THE REFURBISHED ANCESTORS (2025). There are three portrait reproductions of Baracz’s paternal ancestors. Two are of Erazm Barącz, an art collector and mining engineer, and one is of Jakub Barącz. Each painting is mounted on a resin garden toad and above the frames hang six car refresher trees. These were collectively purchased from the Walmart website. Despite the seemingly hand-painted quality of the portraits and their sentimental, familial relation to the artist, their source renders the window display’s constituent parts ontologically commensurate. Each is manufactured and enjoys readymade status. This includes the paintings, which are examples of what, in 1985, Charles Dickinson of The New Yorker, sanctioned as “sofa art”: mass-reproduced paintings sold in furniture stores and, today, online. The display recalls Duchamp’s Pharmacy (1914), which, in his October 19, 1961 MoMA lecture, “Apropos of ‘Readymades’”, Duchamp described as “a cheap reproduction of a winter evening landscape” upon which he added “two small dots, one red and one yellow, in the horizon.” What Duchamp accomplished with dots of paint, Baracz does with other readymades (viz., garden toads, and Little Trees air fresheners).

Having initiated his exhibition with an orthodox Duchampian readymade pursuit, Baracz turns towards the issue of form-based perceptual likenesses with a series of painted rectangular plywood flatbeds. Baracz’s penchant for worldly isomorphism is clarified by the relationship between the works’ telling titles and the arrangement of constituent marks and objects. For instance, in WHY DID THE CHICKEN CROSS THE ROAD? (2024), the plywood offcut is charted by an indistinct, sloping chassis formed by a flattened automobile body shell. In light of the title, the centered fowl-like motif invites comparison to the eponymous “chicken.” In LANDSCAPE WITH A HATCH (2024), the Stygian plank is incised with lath verticals and outdented in the upper-left by a raised semicircle, which suggests a bisected sun and, consequently, the titular landscape scene.

Such pictorial equivocation—neither entirely deracinated from nor at home in the empirical world—is the beating heart of what Andrew Woolbright fittingly deems the artist’s “skeuomorphic tensions”. Baracz also admirably accomplishes this with his “SINTHOMES” (2024) series, a collection of nine wooden balusters, each column dovetailing two vintage Queen Anne furniture legs, their centers bisected by steel circular saw blades. One cannot help but be reminded of Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel (1913), Porte-Bouteilles (1914), and Porte-chapeau (1917). As with these early readymades, Baracz shirks aesthetic beauty. Indeed, Duchamp’s readymade project was motivated by an analysis of the ontology of art and a refusal of both beauty and perceptually discernible content as requisite for an object to count as an artwork. In his 1961 lecture, Duchamp decried “esthetic delectation,” remarking that:

“readymades” … [were] based on a reaction of visual indifference with at the same time a total absence of good or bad taste … One important characteristic was the short sentence which I occasionally inscribed on the “readymade.” That sentence instead of describing the object like a title was meant to carry the mind of the spectator towards other regions more verbal.

Baracz is also clearly interested in the “verbal.” Along the edge of the first gallery room is a stack of playscripts, TWILIGHT STACK (2025). The same scene is reproduced on each page. A work of literary impressionism, this scene is bookended by references to the “Word” which, in the script’s character introduction section, is described as “an invisible and notably absent (perhaps lost?) metonym for language.” One of the protagonists, Sam begins the scene by asking “Word, what happened to your containing act?” and concludes the act by querying “And Word? Can Word trace its way back?”. Following Duchamp, the readymades’ “verbal” concerns espy the necessary and sufficient conditions for something to be an artwork (viz., embodied meaning subtended by a socio-historically commensurate applicable artworld theory). Baracz asks whether the readymade can truly be circumscribed exclusively by the “Word,” at the expense of aesthetics. He seems to suggest that it can not, a lesson evinced by the reception history of Duchamp’s own readymade objects, which have invited the very word-world isomorphisms that Baracz delights in. For example, in his Duchamp: Love and Death, Even, Juan Antonio Ramírez compares Porte-chapeau (1917), Sculpture de voyage (1918), and Ready-made malheureux (1918) to “the underlying idea of the hunter spider … hanging from its thread.” Baracz trades in exhorting such “underlying idea[s]” and worldly homologies.

Duchamp, himself, reacted to such comparisons with great opprobrium. In a 1962 letter to Hans Richter, Duchamp writes that “When I discovered readymades, I thought to discourage aesthetics … I threw the bottle rack and the urinal in their faces as a challenge, and now they admire them for their aesthetic beauty.” Baracz clarifies that the readymade object, wrested from its Lebenswelt, might very well be abdicated of “aesthetic beauty” but world-word resemblances endure. Baracz invites form-based comparisons, treating them as inherent to the essence of the readymade. In turn, the meaning of Baracz’s readymades is distinct from Duchamp’s. In Duchamp’s case, the readymades’ aboutness expressed how an ordinary object could be enfranchised as artwork by entering the art world’s discursive-institutional nexus, rendering “arthood” as an open concept. But Baracz’s readymades, pace Duchamp, trade along the perceptual depurated of beauty, floating on visual ambiguities and optical likenesses.

In his artist statement, Baracz foreground that his interest is, indeed, in the “perceptual shift that occurs when what we look at becomes something very different from its initial appearance.” The “shifts” range in recognizability and not all of Baracz’s readymades rely on conspicuous perceptual anchors. For instance, DARK DIAL (2024), a vertical stack of four used car tires topped with an oil drum lid and surfboard fin, gives the impression of a shark-nosed tower. By admixing abstruse and recognizable forms, it is utterly effective in occasioning such “perceptual shifts.” There is only one case where Baracz is less successful, which is MOLLY THE HIGH SCHOOL AXOLOTL (2025), an embroidered, detachable lace collar shoulder wrap tied into an industrial vent cover. The neck opening and shoulder pads are recognizable and literal such that there the form is, unfortunately, devoid of visual ambiguity. Elsewhere, however, Baracz, in critically responding to Duchamp’s readymade orthodoxy, demonstrates that the genre remains a fecund domain for novel conceptual discoveries.