Topos of inexpressible: Contribution to fundamental assumptions underlying the painting-language relationship

The paper analyses some of the fundamental assumptions about understanding the painter's work. The first one is the physical separation of the artwork and the viewer. In its perceptional sense it makes the approach to the painting more difficult, but in its cognitive sense it makes it easy. The separation causes us to feel fascination, which in turn is projected into the painting, which, consequently, becomes the object of our yearning. From the aesthetical point of view, the result of this projection is a specific aspect of the beautiful, the aspect which possesses a utopian potential. Utopia as Outopos (meaning 'no place' or 'nowhere') is another term for the feature in the painting we can refer to as inexpressible. Utopia is not an iconographic factor, but an ontological characteristic of the painting - the painting is always unreachable, inaccessible, since it is merely a (material) occurrence. Its identity is evident in the phenomenon of entirety. However, the phenomenon of entirety in the picture is evident as a coherence, congruence and mimicry. Nevertheless, it is always cognitively elusive, which makes the painting an exciting and mysterious occurrence that occupies our attention, always re-evoking cognitive yearning