“Textuality” in Nonrepresentational Modern Western Paintings: A Cognitive Multimodal Exploration

This study investigates the “textuality” of modern Western paintings from a Cognitive Linguistic viewpoint. We focused on the examination of nonrepresentational Modern Western paintings, ranging from the figurative to the abstract, and studied how these paintings are arranged structurally. Specifically, we would like to see whether iconicity, an essential principle of linguistic grammar, could be found in the selected paintings. To find out, we combined the methodologies by Hiraga (2005) and Kress and van Leeuwen (1996), and proposed a model multimodal in nature. Our results show that principles of Diagrammatic Iconicity, which structurally shape the textual flows of the paintings, are the cognitive principles guiding our selected painting samples. Moreover, it is found that the textuality of nonrepresentational modern Western paintings, which is highly poetically expressive, can be uniquely distinguished from the visual texts previously studied, which are mostly applied and commercial-in-nature. This transdisciplinary thesis therefore highlights how cognitive principles interact with the compositions of multimodal texts. Most importantly, nonrepresentational modern paintings could be cognitively viewed as an entrenched text, “grammatically” arranged by various layers of Iconicity, fulfilling a ‘reality of text’ (Halliday, 1990).