A Phenomenal Semio-Semantic Appraoch to the Motif of Tree in the Iranian Modernist Painting

The current paper is a phenomenal semio-semantic study of the tree in Iranian modernist paintings. The motif of the tree would escape definition if confined to its semio-semantic dimension. That is why the present study intends to find new meanings for the complicated motif of the tree within the visual frameworks. The focus on the visual elements is central to this semio-semantic method. Interestingly, some Iranian modernist painters were preoccupied with the phenomenon of the tree in different forms. I have selected some works by Davoud Emdadian, Abulqasem Sa’idi, and Abdullah Ameri Alhosseini (picking two works from each artist). Along with the desk research including library and online sources, the data have been collected and analyzed according to the semio-semantic approach. The data shows that the becoming agent A/painter represents the motif of the tree by drawing a connection between the sensory-perceptual and the esthetic functions. Moreover, in the discursive processes, the becoming agent A/painter takes the advantage of elements such as the event, becoming, tension, phenomena, and body. The becoming agent B or the interpreter’s repetition of the process, during the passage through different layers of meaning and culture, re-creates the meaning of the tree as different layers are accumulated.Keywords: semio-semantics, phenomenology, phenomenal semio-semantics of the visual, tree