Compositional Structure as an Artistic Dialogue

Abstract

This article examines certain immanent compositional principles related to deep human psychological processes, their creative potential, and the characteristics of artistic perception and thinking. To this end, the study analyzes visual illusions as illustrations of elementary compositional structures. The author points out that the compositional component is always the relationship between two entities which take countless forms within an artistic compositional pattern. Therefore, composition theory is dominated by descriptive rather than mathematical methods, which view the essence of composition as a “construction for meaning”, as the structure (construction) of dialogue in the artistic “situation of interaction” between “artist-artwork-viewer”. In this case, compositional thinking can only be examined if this structure is accepted as the foundation, the primary, indivisible unit, the “semantic atom”, the starting point of analysis.