| Summary: | This article focuses on how and if the concept of “metalanguage” can be transferred from verbal language to image. This questioning suggests that there is indeed such a thing as a fairly stable iconic code, while it is commonly accepted that this image conceals that very codifying dimension governing its production when its main purpose is more figurative and transitive than reflexive. It is also commonly agreed that each work of art renews and most of the time transgresses the usual representation modes that tradition has established as conventions and rules. If both content and expression are taken into account and consensus built upon them, paradigms of plastic categories can be highlighted. The image is thus revealed as a codified language the actualization of which rests upon choices relevant to its own constitutive system. The contrastive confrontation of two paintings or of two motives within the same work of art discloses differences of plastic as well as formal treatment articulated around a common theme. A contrario, it can show the same formal treatment for two different semantic inputs. Such a confrontation has the effect of sharpening one’s gaze by uncovering the existence of an underlying code associating both content and expression. Such disclosure leads the observer to adopt a metadiscursive attitude as well as a meta-iconic approach that prompt the emergence of the aesthetic moment, i.e. the encounter between the observer ant the painter as it is being enunciated.
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