Chromatic argumentation in visual statements: How color rhetoric is used to persuade

CAIVANO, JOSE LUIS; LÓPEZ, MABEL

AIC 2009, Proceedings of the 11th Congress of the International Color Association

Colour Society of Australia

Lugar: Sidney; Año: 2009; p. 1 - 4

Aristotle’s Rhetoric (350 BC) is the most ancient work exposing a technique to persuade, to promote adhesion by means of reasons that could be more or less logical or credible. In order to argue in favor or against something it was necessary to employ a technique to find what to say (the appropriate arguments), and how to say those ideas. The part of rhetoric dealing with the figures of discourse used to persuade (how to say) is called elocutio, in Latin. Long time ago the analysis of rhetoric figures was extended and generalized to explain the aesthetic and creative uses of language, its poetic function. The deviations that appear in creative texts, as compared to the ordinary use of language, correspond to a large repertoire of rhetorical figures that the studies in poetics coined along centuries. Usually it is considered that its field is poetics and figured speech; however, these operations extend across all kind of discourses and languages. Artistic images, painting, architecture, photography, caricature, cartoons, advertising and many other genres of visual production base their efficacy on the rhetorical use of visual signs. This paper analyzes how the use of color can be a privileged element to argue in a visual image. The values and connotations attributed to color in the context of visual statements work as “proofs” in persuasive discourses. By this means, the use of rhetorical figures is not an end in itself; it is the visible correlate of the argumentation that works as an implicit frame in persuasion.