Combinations with a synesthetic component in the description of the works of Salvador Dali (on the material of art catalogs of painting)

Petrova Svetlana Alekseevna

The work is devoted to the complex functional-semantic analysis of descriptions of pictures, based on the synesthetic metaphor, used within the English-speaking art critic discourse. The article discusses the synesthetic descriptions used in the specialized English-speaking art criticism discourse on the material of the museum catalogs describing the surrealistic painting of S. Dali. One of the features of using such descriptions is the appeal of their authors to the synesthetic experience of the perceiving individual. The article identifies and analyzes the models of intersensual transfer, underlying the synesthetic metaphors. The goal of the author is an attempt to define the functions of these metaphors in the interpretation of the paintings of the great Spanish painter. It is noteworthy that in the comments to his paintings, art critics, as a rule, avoid erased metaphors and clichés, preferring expressive epithets, rarely used metaphors, unconventional collocations, which are absent in corpus dictionaries. Thus, the method of description is close to the object of description: Dali-surrealist is known to have a commitment to bright colours, uncommon forms, combining incompatible images and objects. The article pays special attention to the difficulties of intersemiotic translation, that is, the transfer of content expressed by means of non-verbal sign system to a natural (“verbal”) language.

Keywords:synesthesia, art discourse, metaphor, sensory systems, surrealism