"Scribbling / Gribouillage - Le printemps de l'âme (IV)", for Mary Abbot Painting

What painting means to me. Painting allows me to communicate and share ideas and emotions with people, particularly the people who populate my environment, now scattered over a broad area thanks to social networking: I communicate with them through shapes, forms, colours and signs that eventually form a code, which anyone who wishes to seriously confront my painting will have to crack, or at least try to crack. Someone who chooses painting as a means of expression has not chosen writing, or music, because if this were so we would be talking about literature and poetry, or musical scales. In any case, mine is not a conventional alphabet, but rather has been invented by me, with such an extreme flexibility and adaptability that it eventually questions its own coding system: that is why I think that art is a radically intimate and subjective language that is rooted in individual freedom, and for that very reason it eventually dynamites the code it establishes. It is evident that I can guide the interested spectator with words, a title or a brief comment, although not so much as an interpretation of the work, but rather as an element the spectator can use if they want to get closer to the work. The artist's creative freedom has the counterpoint of the observer's freedom of interpretation. When the spectator feels attracted, disturbed or excited by the work, they cease to be a stranger to it and become the interpreter, or even the protagonist, of the work, to the extent that they help to give the work meaning, and therefore life. This is how the work is kept alive, through those who decide to talk to it, and it is thanks to the sum of these dialogues, of their continuity in time, that the artist's contribution to society gradually takes root. The plastic arts are essentially visual, and therefore constitute the expression of a given aesthetic: the work of art is an object that the artist places before our eyes, be it a painting, a drawing, a photo or a sculpture. It is evident that sight is not the only sense that is involved in or influences the contemplation of a work of art. But it is the first one. Touch and smell may also be brought into play, the former evidently in the case of the sculpture, and the latter in cases in which the work being observed gives off different odours.