Experiencing the Making. Paintings by Paolo Cotani, Marcia Hafif, and Robert Ryman

In the paper we deal with the possibility that we experience creative gestures in the fruition of a specific kind of abstract paintings. For this purpose, we consider few specific, abstract works by artists Paolo Cotani, Marcia Hafif and Robert Ryman, dating back to the early 1970s. These paintings among others have been described by critics as displaying the act of their making, although they are all characterized by an extremely limited range of chromatic and formal features. Searching for a justification of this description, we resist the temptation to account for it in terms of the critics’ knowledge about artists’ intentions and working methods. We rather insist that it is grounded in the perceptual properties of the paintings and in the kind of response that they can trigger in the viewers. We therefore develop a simulative account of the creative gesture, aiming at doing justice to artists’, art critics’ and historians’ theoretical framework, as well as to the observer’s phenomenal experience.