Photography, painting and iconicity: a semiotic study on creative processes in contemporary Brazilian painting

Abstract

Since the mid-19th century, photographs have been used by painters from various parts of the world to guide their creations. By addressing the issue in Brazilian art from the first two decades of this century, we present a semiotic study on the symbolic, indicative and, above all, iconic reference relationships established by painters with photography in their creative processes. The research collected and analyzed documents remaining from the paths taken by fifteen Brazilian artists to produce fifteen paintings, a set chosen based on criteria that attest to their relevance and representativeness in the current national artistic scene. From these documents, we investigated artistic thought in process through precepts of genetic criticism, with a theoretical-methodological approach based on aspects of Charles S. Peirce's philosophy, seeking to identify, in the relationship between the works and records of their creative paths, the symbolic nature of the referential relationships established by the artists with photography, highlighting the iconic level as the predominant tendency.