The fundamental question discussed by the author in this paper is whether communication by means of pictorial (visual) signs, especially those produced by the visual arts, supposes, as does verbal ...communication, a special semiological competence, and if it does, what kind. On the basis of an analysis of relations between the signified and the signifier in iconic artistic signs, the author shows that an iconic artistic sign has two fundamental levels of meaning: referential and formal. The first focuses attention on the signified object; the second, on the inventiveness and morphological complexity of its sign articulation. The first level is automatically accessible through spontaneous visual experience, while the second level can only be activated by metapictorial (artistic) competence, which is defined by the author as the ability to recognize the creative formative aspects of a sign form and their structural correlations.
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