Mathilde Garcia

Lignes de fuite
Lignes de fuite is a series of six objects centred on the status of the decorative within the field of contemporary design. Historically sidelined by modernism and associated with superfluous ornament and so-called feminine practices, the decorative is here reclaimed as a critical space in its own right; one that produces narrative and tension, and an increasingly necessary response to the standardisation of ultra-functionalism and the imperatives of use.
The objects in the series present a deliberately unstable function. They borrow recognisable domestic typologies; vase, cabinet, globe, suitcase; whilst disrupting their use. These objects offer a dual reading: an immediate one, through form and silhouette, and a more attentive one, through the ornamental details that compose them. Ornament thus becomes a tool for narration, enriching the perception of the object without ever rendering it fully legible or strictly utilitarian.
Ornament plays a central role in this work. The patterns developed are largely based on a single floral form, conceived using vector digital tools. This flower, whilst referencing nature, bears the visible traces of its digital origin. It reveals the way in which contemporary tools alter our relationship to drawing, producing artificial, repeatable forms and transforming ornament into image.
This assumed artificiality extends into objects that simulate functions without fully fulfilling them. The vases, for instance, do not hold living flowers, but at most artificial ones, asserting their status as autonomous decorative objects. Some incorporate secondary or contradictory functions, such as shelf brackets, blurring the hierarchy between use and representation. Others clearly dissociate structure from surface; as with the acetate vase, whose «skin» is held at a distance, accentuating the separation between perceived form and supposed function.
The materials employed; aged oak, MDF, acetate, standardised industrial elements; are chosen as much for their symbolic weight as for their materiality. The oak, sourced from the ancient joists of Marie-Antoinette’s stables and over 400 years old, enters into dialogue with contemporary technologies such as 3D printing, themselves heirs to ornamental logics rooted in the Renaissance. This temporal crossover situates the objects within a historical continuum, in which past and present coexist without hierarchy.
The series is built upon a play of contradictions held deliberately open: between function and décor, between industry and nature, between historical heritage and contemporary digital tools. The objects do not seek to resolve these tensions, but to make them visible.