Brushstroke Strikes Again

This brief essay intends to deal with a specific but challenging topic, namely the pictorial brushstroke theoretically understood, in order to test a cross-over of approaches between artist’s writing, art theory, and Visual Culture. The importance and prominence of the brush mark will be addressed by the three different authors; for each it is a symbol and a tool that redefines a new epistemology of the concept of image. The first is the Italian painter and poet Toti Scialoja, who engages in a perennial struggle against the brushstroke in the name of a purely gestural image; the second is the French art historian and semiologist Hubert Damisch, for whom the stroke is a sign that corresponds to an ontology of a so-called “aerial” image; the third is the American art theorist Norman Bryson, who sees in it the instrument for transcending the rigid boundaries between work of art and image in the strict sense. The brushstroke seen as a theoretical object may provide, in the end, an exemplary case study of interdisciplinary analysis between different but tangent methodologies of approach to the image; it hypothetically builds a bridge between the art theory of the mid-20th century modernist season, the enlargement of its limits thanks to structuralist influences, and the landing in the broader territory of Visual Culture.