Maximilian Arnold | Freed from Desire

about Maximilian Arnold’s work

Images always carry with them an intriguing ambiguity, something that feels familiar yet at the same time elusive: even before being worked on, the image exists as data, as a documentary trace of a reality already transformed into an archive. However, the archive is never neutral. Accumulating images already means preparing them for use, for manipulation that redefines their boundaries. The act of recording and archiving is never innocent; it always implies a transformation of the real into a document, and thus into power.

Through cropping and layering, images are distorted, reconfigured, stripped of their unity. This is not a simple juxtaposition, but an act of sabotage against visual order. Collage does not destroy the image; it challenges it. In this sense, it resembles a strategy of infiltration: it owns nothing of its own, it slips into the territories of the readymade, exploiting the pre-packaged power of the image itself.

Fragmentation and constant transformation of the image occur through a process of collage and painting, where the visual matter is never stabilized but remains in perpetual flux. The images undergo a continuous back-and-forth: applying and removing paint until the memory of the process is almost forgotten, much like the manipulation of digital images. White, the disintegration of elements, and the uncertainty of transformation become key components of this investigation. The idea of an image that is open, suspended, is tied to the nature of desire itself: what attracts is never the object itself, but the distance that separates it from its full realization, its inaccessibility, the tension towards what remains unattainable.

There is an inevitable connection between this practice and our present. The collection of images and their montage no longer belong only to art; they have become a daily condition, a logic embedded in the functioning of digital capitalism. Here, painting becomes a field of tension: it does not oppose the logic of recording and collage, but diverts, slows it down, jams it. White, rhythm, and fracture become strategies to free the image from its condition as mere data and reopen the space of desire. Contemporary society lives in a regime of hyper-reality, where the proliferation of images has replaced reality itself. The response to this condition does not oppose visual saturation but performs a subtle sabotage from within, creating zones of silence and suspension.

In a world where the production of images has surpassed any necessity, paintings focus on what escapes the saturation of communication: broken forms, segments of bodies, grafts, and ruptures that never fully recombine. A language that oscillates between the recognizable and the dissolution, between figuration and the collapse of the image into pure matter.

While capital never stops decapitating, painting and collage can learn to stop in the middle of the production cycle, creating spaces of non-work within the very machines that try to incorporate them. Contemporary painting often operates as an interruption of the flow, a pause in the chain of meaning production. Thus, within the folds of repetition, the possibility of a desire that escapes the logic of the commodity might emerge, an image that, finally, has no more work to perform. In this case, the painting practice takes shape as a liminal territory, where the image is constantly suspended between its being and its undoing, between appearance and disappearance.

Bibliography:
Maurizio Ferraris, Documanity: Philosophy in the Age of the Record,, Laterza, 2021
Jacques Lacan, Seminar XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Einaudi, 1973
Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, Marsilio, 1984
John Kelsey, Rich Texts: Selected Writing for Art, Sternberg Press, 2010

Text by Pierfrancesco Petracchi