Artistic Composition as an Integral System

The article considers the specifics of building the composition of an artwork in terms of its integral structure. It states that any composition comprises a number of individual elements or ‘composites’, combined into a triple entity comprising two figurative elements and a nonfigurative link between them, which sometimes leads to a different sequence of image perception. As a result, the meaning of the whole structure can be perceived differently so that in some cases an integral meaning happens to be greater than the sum of all the meanings that make up the structure of the composition. Thus, the perception of artistic imagery is a temporal process where the same image can be understood differently depending on the sequence of perception.