Information & Poetry

The next question is what reference to take as the principle of everything. Where did human beings begin to tell things with the images they created? I look back and don't see where to start. Whatever point I pick up in the story, there's always something earlier with images that tell things. That brings me to.... Prehistory? The cave paintings? And here everything changes for me.

I've never valued cave paintings. In other words, I have never known how to value them. To me, they were an antiquity with no more value than being the first works to be preserved.

Its basic and extremely simple shapes never caught my attention, I was concerned with drawing things well. But when I look at them with my eyes now, I have discovered something very important in them. Communicate. Within these coarse forms lies perfect communication. Those illustrators told the rest of us how they lived and if you look at the images, they understand each other perfectly. It doesn't matter if the shape that represents a hunter is not realistic at all. We understand that he is a hunter because he carries a bow and chases animals. It's perfect communication. In fact, we could recreate that illustration now, realistically, and we wouldn't improve the communication in it.

An image could then be considered to have two independent parts within it. On the one hand, a part of content. With a message and a communication. It's the part that carries the information. On the other hand, there would be a formal part. The textures, colors, and volumes that represent that information. Poetry.

That is, if we commission a thousand different illustrators to represent an image in which hunters are hunting. We will have a thousand ways (way) to illustrate a single piece of information (content).

The concrete image, which represents elements recognizable to the reader, has a part of information or content and another part of poetry or form.

Another example that comes to mind is when in advertising, a client commissions an image to sell something. The designer will be aware of the poetry of the image, but the client will focus on making sure that all the pieces of information they want to convey are present and clearly understood. Many times there are disagreements because the designer feels his poetry is attacked and what the client needs is that the image captures the messages well.