Paintings are as socially awkward as their makers. Paintings are human, not sentient; adolescent, not adult. Which might mean painting is a young person’s game, before self-awareness and the past kicks in. It’s not. It’s an innocent, dumb, ignorant person’s game, at its best. That’s what Gerard Richter meant when he said “Painting is dumb”, or Picasso called “innocence”, or Martin Amis “the wound”, or Jacques Lacan “the symptom”, all of which you have to be ignorant of in order to enact. We first experience paintings (and painters) from afar, then at an angle. They have no profile. Closer they become a mess of surface acne and grease, porous with loose hairs, a teratoma twin of ugly malformations. They are awkward. Adolescent again. Not much to “like” up close — the good ones anyway. They involve you in their shit like the worst narcissistic friend. They take you in, introject you, imbibe you to leave you empty. Paintings are nothing but need. From wet to dry, juicy grape to raisin death, sometimes they blink back. When Isabelle Graw calls paintings “quasi-persons” against the setting of the art market, I think of vampiric collectors trafficking and flipping, not just paintings, but the vitalism of the painter themselves measured in time, spit, sweat and a loose eyelash or two. What if Schrödinger put a painting in a box?