I’m not entirely sure when design started to promise little things that suddenly seemed essential. Maybe it was when it stopped being quiet. Or when it began explaining things before anyone had even asked. Design—that supposedly silent trade—started speaking loudly. Selling certainties. Organizing the world as if the world were a perfectly aligned Excel spreadsheet¹.
With my tired eyesight, I can say I come from a blurry place where design solves nothing. Where painting doesn’t save anyone either. Where things are half crooked, or simply badly done. And it is precisely in this mess that a kind of differential surplus emerges.
It’s not exactly a position to boast about. It’s more a persistent discomfort, like sitting on a three-legged chair.
For years I’ve worked as a graphic designer. I’ve fulfilled commissions. Followed briefs. Done—and still do—what needs to be done. I don’t deny that. The problem isn’t working. The problem is when design starts to believe it’s indispensable. When it presents itself as the natural solution to problems that perhaps shouldn’t be solved so quickly.
Designing today is a polite way of shutting mouths. Things are the way they are designed, period. Painting, on the other hand, doesn’t know how to close anything. Painting opens holes—mouths, ears, even the anus—and then it leaves.
Between those two gestures—closing and opening—is where one patiently sets up camp. Painting doesn’t interest me as a romantic territory, nor design as a technical discipline. What matters is the uncomfortable space that appears between them. That place where design begins to fail and painting hasn’t yet arrived—and may never arrive at all. That place where absolutely nothing happens is precisely where the interest lies.
It’s often said that design is neutral. That it simply organizes information. That it makes life easier. That it doesn’t take sides. But that isn’t true.
Every form organizes the world in a specific way. Every visual hierarchy is a political hierarchy in miniature. Deciding what is seen first and what comes later is not a technical issue. It’s a position, whether taken with good or bad intentions.
Contemporary design often operates as a low-frequency ideology. It doesn’t shout. It doesn’t impose. But it seduces like a Hollywood heartthrob. It makes you feel comfortable. And that’s where the catch lies. Ideology is not understood as something that deceives us, but as something we follow even when we know it’s deceiving us². We know many of design’s promises—clarity, efficiency, impact—are simplifications. And still, we keep operating within them.
Painting is sometimes seen as an escape. A refuge. A romantic gesture against the coldness of design. But if we reposition ourselves on the map, painting is simply another kind of conflict. Less productive, less measurable, but no less demanding. Painting doesn’t help communicate better. It exists to ruin what seemed clear. To resist the obligation to make sense. The need to explain. The anxiety to close an image that “works.” Painting is slow. And that slowness is uncomfortable in a world designed to accelerate³.
Boris Groys says that art is not defined by producing novelty, but by changing the context of what already exists⁴. Painting, in that sense, doesn’t compete with design. It messes up its hair. It doesn’t improve communication. It interrupts it. And that interruption is political, even if it doesn’t intend to be.
To inhabit the middle ground is not to endure crossfire—because you barely exist for anyone. You’re in nothingness, moving from one side to the other without knowing where to lay an egg. Like a Dersu Uzala wandering the Siberian desert⁵. It’s about creating emptiness in order to produce an active space to move within. The interval as the place where thought happens⁶.
Design hates that emptiness. It fills it. Justifies it. Turns it into a functional margin. I like working in that space where nothing happens. Where design no longer knows what to do and painting hasn’t yet started saying anything. It’s an uncomfortable place. Definitely not a chalet with a view. More like wandering through inhospitable terrain. It can’t be sold easily, mainly because no one knows where to place the “For Sale” sign.
There’s a lot of talk about critical, speculative, social, ethical design. And that’s fine. But it also makes me suspicious. Sometimes critical design becomes just another style. Another label. Another way of soothing consciences.
Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby insist that design shouldn’t offer solutions, but questions⁷. I agree. But even questions can become products. The system is very skilled at absorbing criticism. That’s why I’m more interested in failure than intention. Not designing to change the world. Designing to show that the world is not for sale.
A place that resists being organized, hierarchized, functionalized. I don’t consider myself a painter in the classical sense. Nor a designer in the orthodox one. I work with leftovers. With images that come from design and that painting takes pleasure in ruining. With graphic structures that lose their function and become matter⁸. Persisting not out of nostalgia, but out of stubbornness.
Against mandatory clarity. We live obsessed with clarity. Everything must be understood quickly. Everything must be accessible. Everything must be usable. I’m not against clarity. I’m against its obligation. There are things that can’t be understood. And that’s fine. Design has assumed a constant pedagogical role. It explains. Translates. Simplifies. Sometimes simplifying is just a soft form of censorship⁹.
There’s talk of aesthetic fatigue. Of image saturation that no longer produces meaning¹⁰. It’s increasingly hard to look. Increasingly hard to stop. Design produces effective images, but exhausted ones. Painting can afford to be clumsy. Slow. Useless. And in that uselessness there is rest. Drawing not to arrive somewhere, but to get lost for a while.
Anne Burdick speaks of design as an epistemic tool—as a way of thinking, not just communicating¹¹. That’s where I find a point of contact with painting. Both can function as devices for imagining. Not for solving.
In the end, everything returns to that intermediate space. Neither pure design. Nor pure painting. A blurry territory. Where there are no clear answers. No perfect projects. There are doubts. Big screw-ups. And little things that don’t fit. And that, today, seems enough to me.
Not to save ourselves from design. Not to renew painting. Not at all. Just to keep walking through the desert of the naïve. Slowly. Alone. Even if it’s useless.
And perhaps precisely because of that, in the place where nothing ever happens, everything begins.
Notes
1. Vilém Flusser, The Philosophy of Design; The Coded World. Design understood as cultural programming that shapes behaviors and modes of thought.
2. Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology. Ideology as something we continue to follow even when we know it is false.
3. Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep. A critique of productive acceleration and the impossibility of real rest.
4. Boris Groys, On the New; Art Power. Art as recontextualization rather than innovation.
5. Vladimir Arsenyev, Dersu Uzala; Akira Kurosawa, Dersu Uzala (1975). The figure of the guide who inhabits extreme territories without stable maps.
6. Reflections on the interval and emptiness as active spaces of thought, present across various contemporary critical traditions.
7. Anthony Dunne & Fiona Raby, Speculative Everything. Critical design as a producer of questions—and its possible absorption by the system.
8. Rosalind Krauss; Yve-Alain Bois, Formless: A User’s Guide. The formless as an operation of formal declassification.
9. Byung-Chul Han, The Transparency Society. Clarity and total visibility as forms of soft control.
10. Hito Steyerl, The Wretched of the Screen. Accelerated image circulation and the erosion of meaning.
11. Anne Burdick et al., Digital_Humanities. Design as an epistemic tool and a mode of knowledge production.
