I’m not entirely sure when design started promising little things that sounded absolutely necessary. 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.
For years I have worked as a graphic designer. I have fulfilled commissions. I have followed briefs. I have done, and still do, what has to be done. And I do not reject that. The problem is not working. The problem begins when design believes it is indispensable. When it presents itself as the natural solution to every problem.
Designing today is a polite way of shutting people up. Things are the way they are designed. It is often said that design is neutral. That it merely organizes information. That it makes life easier. That it does not take sides. But that is not true.
Every form organizes the world in a particular way. Every visual hierarchy is a miniature political hierarchy. Deciding what is seen first and what comes after is not a technical matter. It is a position, even when taken with the best intentions.
Contemporary design often works as a low-frequency ideology. It does not shout, agitate, or even impose. It simply seduces. It makes you feel comfortable. And that is the catch. Ideology is not something that deceives us, but something we continue to follow even when we know it is deceiving us². We know that many of design’s promises (clarity, efficiency, impact) are simplifications. And yet we continue to operate within them.
Sometimes painting is thought of as an escape. A refuge. A romantic gesture against the coldness of design. But if we reposition ourselves on the map, painting means entering another kind of conflict. Less productive, less measurable, but no less demanding. Painting is not there to communicate better. It is there to spoil what seemed clear. To resist the obligation to make sense. The need to explain. The anxiety of closing 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 novelties, but by changing the context of what already exists⁴. Painting, in that sense, does not compete with design. It messes up its hair. It does not improve communication. It interrupts it. And that interruption is political, even if it does not intend to be.
To inhabit the middle earth is not to withstand crossfire because you barely exist for anyone. You are in the middle of nowhere, moving from one side to another without knowing where to lay your egg. Like a Dersu Uzala in the Siberian desert⁵. It means making a void in order to create an active space in which to move. The interval as the place where thought is produced⁶.
Design hates that void. 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 has not yet begun to say anything. That place is uncomfortable. It is not exactly a villa with a view. It is wandering through an inhospitable place. It cannot be sold easily, for the simple reason that no one knows where to place the “for sale” sign.
There is a lot of talk about critical, speculative, social, ethical design. And that is 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 should not offer solutions, but questions⁷. I agree. But even questions can become products. The system is very skilled at absorbing criticism. That is why I am more interested in failure than in 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 do not consider myself a painter in the classical sense. Nor a designer in the orthodox sense. I work with leftovers. With images that come from design and that painting is in charge of spoiling. With graphic structures that lose their function and become matter⁸. Persisting not out of nostalgia, but out of stubbornness.
Against compulsory clarity. We live obsessed with clarity. Everything must be understood quickly. Everything must be accessible. Everything must be usable. I am not against clarity. But I am against its obligation. There are things that cannot be understood. And that is fine. Design has assumed a constant pedagogical role. It explains. Translates. Simplifies. Sometimes simplifying is a form of soft censorship⁹.
There is talk of aesthetic fatigue. Of the saturation of images that no longer produce meaning¹⁰. It is becoming harder and harder to look. Harder and harder to stop. Design produces effective images, but exhausted ones. Painting can allow itself to be clumsy. Slow. Useless. And in that uselessness there is a kind of rest. Drawing not in order to arrive somewhere, but to get a little lost.
Anne Burdick speaks of design as an epistemic tool. As a way of thinking, not only of communicating¹¹. There 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 painting painting. A blurred territory. Where there are no clear answers. No perfectly rounded projects. There are doubts. Huge fuck-ups and little things that do not fit. And that, today, seems enough to me.
Not to save ourselves from design. Not to renew painting. Far from it. Only to keep taking a walk through the desert of the gullible. Even slowly. Even alone. Even if it is good for nothing.
And perhaps precisely because of that, in the place where nothing ever happens, lies the origin of everything.
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.
