The silence of the image and the symbolusion

Abstract

The contemplation of images and metaphors can be considered through imagery itself. We would like to introduce two tuned concepts that will function as building blocks in the theoretical groundwork of the artistic-academic image thinking: the silence of the image and the symbolusion. The rst weighs the nature of the image, with its signifying richness and the resistance to arrive at speaking or writing from that silence. We read images as elds of meaning that o er a dynamic structure of formal de- tails and material appearance that can be interpreted. Both the structure present in the image, and the inseparable interpretation that can be derived from that, are metaphorical in nature. Only metaphors and metonymies can lure the silence of the image into talkative imagery – the speech of the image. This implies that each speech of an image is preceded by an implicit comprehensive silence of the image, just like every explicit message contains an implicit charge. Thus, metaphors are anything but an ornament. Their unpredictable nature a ects the essence of the image. The expression of the metaphor indicates that a choice has been made from the barely reducible vast potential of the silence of the image.