Sedimented Expressions and Indirect Language in John Berger’s A Painter of Our Time

The aim of the present research is to investigate the relation between phenomenology and language, and to comprehend the cognitive experience by reading a literary work or an aesthetic text. It also addresses the process of pure perception and visualization of an object in the mind and the relation of body to the world within the phenomenal field. The present study delves into John Berger’s A Painter of Our Time (1958) in order to examine the painterly process of expressing an array of human sensations and experience of the world, eventually revealing the truth. The phenomenological philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty enables an intersubjective interaction between “body”, “experience”, language and “perceptual world”. This study thus seeks to address the mechanics of the painter’s mind, exploring the root of being and eventually explaining his style and mute meaning. Focusing on whether visualizing, reading, and thinking through a work of art in a text, could provide an aesthetic experience of the text ultimately brings an aesthetic judgment of a work of art based on the knowledge gained through the literary text. Consequently, the readers, positioning themselves in the synesthetic and experience of the text, develop a new visual and aesthetic experience of the world.