created 2025-07-03, & modified, =this.modified
tags:y2025
rel:Gesture and Speech by André Leroi-Gourhan
Graphism the expression of thought in material symbols. Graphism developed not as a photographic representation of reality, but as an abstraction that was geared towards magical-religious matters.
Early graphism then was a form of writing that constitutes a ‘symbolic transposition, not copying of reality’.
It has been hypothesized (but not proven) that the first forms of graphism was a series of tight lines, or curves engraved in bone or stone.
The earliest known paintings do not represent a hunt or a family scene, but are graphic building blocks without any associated description.
rel: Asemic - The Art of Writing
All these early forms therefore suggests that figurative art was directly linked with language and was, in the broadest sense, much closer to writing than to what we understand by a work of art. It was symbolic transposition, not copying of reality, that is to say that graphism did not begin by reproducing reality in a slavishly photographic manner, but with abstraction.