Structuralist readings: Painting vs. picture

Abstract

The aim of the paper is to point to two fundamentally different strategies of painting practice, that is, to two subsystems of painting: picture and painting. This differentiation can be made within the framework of semiotic and semiological analyses which have developed in theory under the influence of structuralism. The first part of the paper offers a basic insight into the linguistic foundation of structuralistic concept, and then sets a thesis about the possibility of analogue reconceptualisation of semiotics/semiology of painting through Julia Kristeva's semiotics and Roland Barthes' semiology. In addition, it points to the concrete concepts of structural analysis which have accentuated the opposition picture-painting with the examples of art practice concurrent to the development of structuralism. However, what is revealed is that various structuralist readings are significantly subjective to unstable relationship between the basic elements in the pictorial object, that is, in the work of painting.