How to understand my paintings

Like most painters when I was young I painted a great deal of figures, landscapes, still lives and portraits, and sometimes I still do. Very soon, however, I began to wonder ‘what does a painted tree mean?’ and a painted bowl? Pictorially they were only shapes, colours and stains. It all was about composition.

In an elementary approach abstraction could be considered as a translation of a real thing, as an expression of a gesture or a brushstroke, and as an assertion of the physical presence of the painting as an object.
But abstraction is not so naïve. In abstraction there are also different cultural backgrounds, new conceptions, casual glances, thoughts and experiences that interfere with the creative process or even induce and trigger it. There are also dreams that resist an explanation even to the one who had them. And very often paintings are self-referred and take inspiration from art history or the works of other artist (like Picasso being inspired by Velazquez's Las Meninas) or even from works by the artist himself that the viewer wouldn’t be able to identify because they are unpublished or because the artist’s body of work is not well-known.

In my paintings the subject is the painting itself

After years of painting, I have come to believe that the painting speaks itself. The painting should be an experience rather than a declaration of intention. Following many hours of being alone with each of my paintings, struggling with them, hating and loving them, I made a kind of truce: I would start to listen to what they had to say and I would break free from the burden of objects. Using abstraction I try to explain more because an identifiable image excludes too many things. The outcome is something familiar but avoids to be revealed. The paintings themselves dictate what they want to be. I only echo from inside: 'it works or it does not work''.

Now you should ask yourself again "What does this abstract painting mean" and you will see that the question is equivalent to asking “What does this chair mean?”. The chair is only an object and so is the painting. Certainly the chair is useful for you to seat on but it is meaningless. And precisely the only use of a painting is to generate meaning and, in the case of abstraction, the viewer is the one to make the painting meaningful. The "echoes" within you may or may not coincide with those of the artist, but the fact is that the painting is still alive and requires you to keep on giving meaning to it.
There is no right or wrong answer to this question. Abstract art is open to interpretation.