this book refers to several semioticians’ study to answer the question that what is an image? and to inquire the resemblances and distinctions between image and language. In other words, this book undertakes to explore the nature of images by comparing them with words, or, more precisely, by looking at them from the viewpoint of verbal language.
An intention in this book is to make a contest between the interests of verbal and pictorial representation it propose that we historicize it, and treat it, not as a matter for peaceful settlement under the terms of some all- embracing theory of signs, but as a struggle that carries the fundamental contradictions of our culture into the heart of theoretical discourse itsel​f
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From this book i found one chapter called " picturing the invisible" that introduces me helpful information to interpret painterly images, also helps me re-articulate the subject matter and purpose of my own painting practice.
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Picturing the invisibe
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What expression amounts to is the artful planting of certain clues in a picture that allow us to form an act of ventriloquism, an act which endows the picture with eloquence, and particularly with a nonvisual and verbal eloquence. A picture may articulate abstract ideas by means of allegorical imagery.
expression need not be limited to predicates we can attach to pictured objects: the setting, compositional arrangement, and color scheme may all carry expressive charge, so that we can speak of moods and emotional atmospheres whose appropriate verbal counterparts may be something on the order of a lyric poem.The expressive aspect of imagery may, of course, become such a predominant presence that the image becomes totally abstract and ornamental, representing neither figures nor space, but simply presenting its own material and formal elements. it is slightly hard to perceive pictorial expression since our understanding of it is so often clouded by the same mystique of "natural representation" that obstructs our under- standing of mimetic representation.
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