SEMIOTICS OF EMPTY SPACES: DIALECTICAL RUPTURE, INTERVAL, PAUSE

Abstract

This paper aims to explore the semiotics of empty spaces, the function of the interval and the pause as forms of dialectical interruption, and a conceptual framework grounded in resistance to linear, mimetic, and illusionistic modes of representation. The specificity of interruption as an active site of agency defines emptiness as plenitude, constructs meaning in and through the pause, reveals dynamism within the void, conceives silence as a structural element of sound, and locates movement within stillness.

Emerging as a response to experiences of alienation and to the social conditions of particular historical moments, these artistic methods and practices are founded upon an anti-materialist approach that seeks to create spaces for active perception rather than passive contemplation. Grounded in the logic of shock and semantic encoding, the selected artistic examples conceptualize empty spaces as sites of meaning production.

The analysis encompasses works from a range of creative disciplines, including painting, sculpture, music, film, artists' objects, graphic art, and object photography. Their dialectical structure is based on the use of abstraction as a vehicle of profound conceptual significance, converging through practices of non-objective art, the act of tearing, décollage, the gesture of erasure, emptiness within the void, silence, dematerialization, discrepant montage, the reduction of the sign, and the concept of whiteness.