اسب در نقاشی منصور قندریز: تحلیل نشانه- معناشناسانه‌ی یک اثر

Mansour Qandriz is one of the most talented contemporary painters in Iran whose name is usually associated with the Saqakhaneh School; however, many of his figurative works, which have been created using the world of myths and ancient traditions of Iranian illustration and have primitive and mysterious character, have been excluded from the scope of research. In his paintings, this artist has used the aesthetic values of the Iranian visual tradition to identify and create meaning, as well as the theme of the horse, which has been common in Iranian art since ancient times, in a repetitive and meaningful way. The following research, by selecting a work by this artist, which is dominated by a mythical and mysterious atmosphere and also shows two horses in it, while one of them has two horns on its head, try to explore the mechanism of meaning creation and how the theme of the horse participates in the process of creating meaning. According to the authors, there is no similar example of a horse with two horns and it is the invention of Qandriz himself, which can be seen in his other artworks. Despite many searches, so far no research has been found that has independently analyzed the meaning of Qandriz’s artworks. The only example is an article titled “Intertextual reading of Mansour Qandriz’s figurative artworks” (2019) by Taranom Taqavi and Mahboubeh Pahlavan, in which some of his paintings were read by a group of audiences; In line with the confirmation of what Roland Barthes said, there is a possibility of creating meaning for each text based on the number of the audience and based on their mental pre-texts. Other articles, all of which have been conducted around the Saqakhaneh School, have sometimes dealt with Mansour Qandriz in a very brief manner. Considering the existence of a kind of discourse and the sense of the presence of action and tension in the artwork selected by this research, the method of Discourse Semantics has been chosen for analysis to understand the unique and independent meaning of this image. Discursive sign-semantics is the fruit of structural semiotics and narrative system of semantic studies. This view links the flow of meaning production and sensory conditions and considers a kind of ontology for linguistic production. Discursive sign-semantics signifies an event variant of the presence of sign-meanings and investigates the function, production, and reception of meaning in discursive systems. Sign-semantics of discourse is sketched in the form of processes and different emotional, cognitive, sensory-perceptual, esthetics dimensions. All of these variants share the flexibility and fluidity of sign-meaning and are revealed under the supervision and control of the discourse process. In this process, signs, along with meanings, are turned into fluid, dynamic, plural, multi-dimensional and full of tension variants. Sign-semantics patterns can act as an efficient method for analyzing literary texts and predisposing them to new readings. The main goal of the research is to reveal the meaning of the painting and its secondary goal is to understand the function and meaning related to the role of the horses in it. The choice of discourse semantic method enables this research to cross the semantic square and reveal the final meaning of the effect and function of the horses in it by analyzing the stress square. The research findings indicate that it is the result of action and interaction between the elements and factors of discourse in the image is perfection and excellence, and the horse plays the accompanying role and auxiliary factor of mankind. In this work, the horned horse is estimated to be a conservationist and dependent on femininity. The choice of mentioned method enabled this research to reveal the atmosphere, discourse coloring and image location as well as discourse factors. The atmosphere is formed by the collision of two elements, dark and light, man and woman. While at first glance the image appears in captivity and a circle of darkness, the discourse coloring and subsequent stages of analysis reveal that there is light on the dark side as well as vice versa. The primitive state of the horse’s face with the woman, the entanglement of the body of the two, and the calmness and ignorance of the woman, have given a protective role to the horse with her. The discourse factors in this image are: the active man, the passive woman, the horse on the right as the female helper, the horse on the left as the male helper, and the small white ball in the horned horse’s hand as the man’s desirable value object. Since semantic squares provide a limited and closed reading for this image, it is necessary to skip the semantic square and deal with the tension square. Perfection and excellence is the result of action and interaction between the elements and factors of discourse in the image. Although elements such as darkness, stillness, passivity, and femininity appear to be opposed to light, motion, activity, and masculinity, meaning is formed by the movement between these concepts and the action between them; otherwise, the meaning will be rigid and one-sided.