Folded Nodes: Rafael Domenech
Hua International is pleased to present the second solo exhibition of Rafael Domenech in Beijing, Folded Nodes. The exhibition takes its name from the concept of a "folded node," a term borrowed from network systems and diagrammatic logic. In mathematics and computing, a folded node cross-connects points that would otherwise never intersect. Domenech repurposes this idea as both form and metaphor, creating a spatial network where disparate elements—art, language, and architecture—unexpectedly converge.
In Folded Nodes, Rafael Domenech transforms the gallery into a hyperrelational landscape of language, material, and structure. The exhibition unfolds across a vibrant green infrastructural framework—a sprawling, diagrammatic system that resembles scaffolding yet functions more like an architectural model. This green network, reminiscent of a building's ground cable, runs throughout the space, connecting every element like a citywide circuit designed to discharge loose currents. In electrical systems, the ground cable is the one wire you can touch without risk— it stabilizes, protects, and ensures continuity. Here, it operates as both literal support and metaphorical infrastructure, a conduit that holds together the fragmented material of the exhibition while underscoring the interconnectedness at the heart of Domenech’s practice.
This green framework serves as a stage for the works themselves—sedimented surfaces of image and text that hover in space, installed like nodes within a living diagram. Across this structure runs an AI-generated poem, an extended sentence produced through Domenech's collaboration with a closed-system natural language learning AI. The artist fed the AI two seemingly incompatible inputs: a book of concrete poetry from Robert Creeley and a mathematical formula. The machine, caught between the logic of numbers and the elasticity of language, responded with a multiplicity, a long labyrinthine text. One of its most striking outputs was the term “copious images”—a phrase evoking an image field that exists everywhere at once, without hierarchy or fixed form. This long sentence—an improbable synthesis of abstract reasoning and personal expression—becomes both a sculptural element and a linguistic artifact. The result is not just an output of machine learning but a reflection of Domenech’s own voice: the pronoun "I" recurs throughout the text, as if the artist’s subjectivity has been refracted through the dispassionate lens of computation.
Domenech’s works, suspended from the green infrastructure, resist traditional classification. Neither paintings nor sculptures, they operate as complex, stratified compositions that draw closer to mosaics, collages, and architectural diagrams. Each piece is constructed from layers of industrial surplus paper, misprints, and photographic fragments accumulated in the artist's studio—material residues of past production cycles. These elements, often treated as ephemera, are recontextualized into new configurations, producing what Domenech calls “sedimented surfaces”: flatbed picture planes where traces of labor, time, and information consolidate into visual topographies. Much like urban surfaces plastered with posters, torn down and replaced, these works evoke a palimpsest of visual noise and residual meaning.
Folded Nodes is an exhibition as much about process as it is about form. Domenech’s practice unfolds through systems of accumulation, filtration, and reconfiguration—an approach that draws inspiration from Manuel DeLanda’s A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History. Like DeLanda, Domenech resists linear narratives, instead tracing the self-organizing processes of material flows across time. His works, like DeLanda’s historical method, move away from ideological frameworks and toward an understanding of history as shaped by matter, energy, and information. This non-linear approach to form reflects Domenech's view of abstraction not as an aesthetic conclusion but as an informational structure—a dynamic vehicle for what comes next.
Indeed, for Domenech, abstraction is less about geometric purity than about consolidating and reorganizing information. "Abstraction is information," he asserts. "It’s not about form alone but about how meaning accumulates through process." In this context, geometry becomes camouflage—a seemingly stable framework that, upon closer inspection, reveals itself to be mutable, contingent, and provisional. This understanding of abstraction aligns with Domenech’s rejection of singularity, a stance reflected in the exhibition’s pluralized title. Just as a folded node disrupts linear pathways in network systems, Domenech’s works resist fixed interpretations, offering instead a multiplicity of entry points and outcomes.
In many ways, Domenech’s practice sits at the intersection of Dieter Roth’s material experimentation and Agnes Martin’s structural rigor. From Roth, he inherits a love for provisionality, collage, and material instability; from Martin, a commitment to repetition and the grid—not as a symbol of order but as a mutable scaffold for navigating instability. Yet, unlike Martin’s meditative austerity, Domenech’s grids vibrate with visual noise, fragmented text, and chromatic dissonance. The exhibition’s green infrastructural framework reinforces this sense of contingency and connection. Domenech describes it as a “three-dimensional layout of subtitles”—a structure that mediates between the viewer and the artworks, much like closed captions translating sound into text. Within this structure, each artwork becomes a node—a site of convergence where language, material, and memory intersect, fold, and unfold. Like the ground cable it evokes, this framework stabilizes the otherwise fragmented elements of the show while underscoring their interconnectedness. It is both diagram and substrate, holding together the sedimented surfaces, the AI-generated text, and the suspended works like a circulatory system of meaning and form.
Ultimately, Folded Nodes is less a static exhibition than a living diagram—a network of relationships continually reconfiguring itself. In an era dominated by algorithmic image production and digital abstraction, Domenech’s work reminds us that every system, no matter how rational, is shaped by the contingencies of material and the fragility of personal history. The result is an exhibition that is at once technological and deeply human—a testament to the generative potential of folding, rather than resolving, the contradictions at the heart of contemporary life.
RAFAEL DOMENECH, running in opposite, 2025, found rock, paint, plywood, laser print on various papers, archival adhesive, 77 x 70 x 9 cm.
