Miha Majes – HARD RESET

SMDOT/Contemporary Art is delighted to announce ‘HARD RESET’, the first Italian solo exhibition by Miha Majes, an emerging Slovenian artist.

In all the selected works, there is a gesture that runs through his entire practice: defusing the image. Not destroying it, not denying it, but opening it up as one might open a device, revealing its exposed wires, its potential short circuits, the space where the eye can stop consuming and return to desiring. From this point, each artworks functions as a station of RE-DESIRE: an invitation to reprogramme our relationship with forms, with objects, with the remnants of a world that demands we always desire in the same way.

Painting, sculpture, installation: the media intersect and influence one another. Assemblage is the primary grammar: metal, plastics, painted surfaces, found objects, humble and industrial materials arranged in precarious yet essential balances. The painting becomes an object, the object becomes a sign, the sign becomes an environment. Nothing remains in its place: the work does not represent, but redirects flows, slows down perceptual automatisms, and suspends the immediacy of interpretation.
It is in this suspension that the fertile friction between image and desire is generated.

RE-DESIRE, therefore, as both a practice and an ethic. Three cartographies of desire run through the work like a watermark: Spinoza’s affirmative power, where to desire means to increase one’s capacity to exist; Deleuze’s desiring machine, which connects and produces beyond fixed identities; and the critical horizon evoked by Mark Fisher, in which desire must escape the post-capitalist circuit of capture and infinite recycling. The works do not merely illustrate these ideas: they put them to the test. By assembling heterogeneous fragments, they force unprecedented pairings and open up passages of meaning where the image is no longer a screen but a generative interface.