What is it that makes a painting be a painting?

Francesco Giaveri introduced me to Sorin Neamtu. We had a conversation about the relationship between text and painting. Sorin asked himself “Does the text about painting deserve to be painted on a painting?” I asked myself “Does the painting about writing deserve to be written on a writing?” Drawing on these ideas, I wrote a letter in ink on stone paper addressed to the viewer of the exhibition “There’s more to the problem”. In this letter I raised questions and mysteries of language and painting. What makes a text a text and not a painting? What happens with asemic writings? Or with the alphabets that we do not know? Are they texts? Are they paintings? In the letter, texts are combined with stains and asemic writings to convey all these questions.