Frances Loeffler interviews artist Allison Katz whose exhibition All is On will be on view at Kunstverein Freiburg from September 18 – November 1, 2015.

Katz remarks: "I think painting has this amazing, vulnerable, open-door policy and quality of permission. You can technically always re-enter a painting, that is almost part of the pact of the material. It’s not ‘locked’. And as a viewer this may be part of the empathy that draws one into looking and feeling it. When you look at a painting, either your own or by someone else, made now or hundreds of years in the past, there is nothing stopping you (apart from the law) from carrying on with it. From picking up where the hand left off. You converse directly though a mark; it actually has the quality of a spoken word, because you can trace it in time and space."