Resumen de The Frame and the Window: Rhetoric Value in the Visual Field
The frame can be used as a device for delimiting an area or a surface that is supposed to be perceived with a certain emphasis on a particular section of the visual universe. It can work as a way for the perceiving subject to focus on the aim itself of the perceptual field. Introducing boundaries into the visual experience, the frame contributes to the good definition, centring the viewer’s attention on a certain object or a particular vision of reality. The rhetoric function of the frame, that often cost more than the painting itself in the examples of altarpieces built throughout the Middle-Ages, had a continuity in the historical periods that followed. In fact, departing from the albertian perspective tradition, consecrated by the grid often depicted by Dürer, the frame introduced the suggestion of a window open onto a reality. It isolated the elements that were intended to be perceived, from those intended to be ignored, to which one should not pay attention. The human gaze should, therefore, be conditioned by the physicality of limits imposed by this object known as frame. The dual aspects of the window open onto a spatial section and delimited by its frame that encases a surface, have become a convention that is fully resolved through visual perception in individuals in our globalised cultural context. Moreover, the relevance of the frame in painting was deconstructed under the work of some artists using trompe l’oeil , under some currents of historical avant-gardes, even in the 20 th century duchampian trends or the work of some surrealist painters like Magritte. The intrinsic irony of the frame in the context of painting has become itself nowadays a theme and the issues derived from the problematic have made their transition to other artistic visual fields such as photography, cinema and conceptual art.
