Alix Gallet

Born in 1989, Alix Gallet works between Paris and Le Mans. Trained in applied arts in Paris (ESAA Duperré) and Eindhoven (Design Academy), she has developed a decorative approach to painting that aims to explore the connections between art, design, management and spirituality.

As phrased by William Morris, the industrial revolution of the 19th century has impoverished applied arts. Following the same line of thought, one can recognize that today’s service economy has depreciated design by driving it towards immaterial forms. Creation has discarded objects and retired in atmospheres, attitudes, relationships.

Vacating the reflexion on object functionality, design is evolving into a management formulation. Schemes, organisations and systems are the new favored forms of this type of approach. In this shift towards immateriality, design is edging closer to an esoterical understanding, accentuating the invisible to the detriment of physical objects. It is particularly obvious in service design practice, which identifies to a sort of entrepreneurial engineering focused on defining new functionalities. In this framework, designers determine user paths, experiences, organizational shapes.

Similarly, the methodology of “design thinking” rationalizes the creative process in order to purge it of its inherent chaos and to reduce it to a linear formula, readily appliable to management. In this case, design becomes an “attitude”, envisioned for unlimited fields, from the most intimate and personal level all the way up to the most global degree : from oneself to the universe.

Thinking the potential relationships between the self and the cosmos is indeed an esoterical concern. This informal evolution - the immaterial shift - turns design into a surface of projection, welcoming magical thinking, re-enchantment psalmodies, quests for substance, most of the time plainly irrational.

In her paintings, Alix Gallet questions this displacement in design through practice and process. She strives to create a visual language hybridizing esoteric schemes (such as ikigai or the Enneagram), management diagrams (like SWOT, Business Model Canvas…), corporate logotypes and formal symbolisms from the history of art (geometric abstraction, suprematism,…). Using forms to shape ideas, whether philosophical, scientifical, spiritual, or economical, this new design plans on building decorums for the New Age creative company, aspiring for harmony between professional and spiritual achievement.

Just as Modern Art dreamt about the Gesamtkunstwerk (with painting as its noblest mean), design in the management era fantasizes its globality. It aims at defining all possible decors for human activities. It wants to mediate all spaces, all interactions, all productions, from geopolitics to wallpapers. Simulating this desire for totality, Alix Gallet’s paintings intend to hold together their potential functions, either utilitarian, decorative or magical. Operations and applications are multiplying : faux-marble transmutations, color schemes for lifestyles, vision board oracles, trend divinations…

Immaterial design turns the artist gesture away from creation to capitalize on the desire for creation. Alix Gallet is staging the search for the mythical “pure moment” of creation, investigating everything capable of bringing in ideas from inspiration to revelation. Her paintings are thus designed as objects meeting a transcendental need through creative (entrepreneurial) gesture as well as questioning some practices disconnected from crafts.