• The visual system is a mandatory object recognition system. The visual field must be categorised into objects, this happens largely involuntarily and normally highly comprehensively.
• Although it is not known exactly how object recognition operates in the visual system, a great deal is known. It often occurs by 'perceptual grouping', that is, putting visual cues together to form clumps or groups that take on the value of object-ness.
• Normally all the visual data received by the system is categorised, assigned meaning based on memory, our vast accumulated experience since birth. It is fast and efficient, using a minimum of information to create a seemingly rich and accurate impression of the world (although easily prone to errors).
• All objects in the visual field must be classified. Once classified we make assumptions about them based on a massive storehouse of knowledge and experience (likely weight, texture, taste, volume, etc.). This is knowledge brought to bear from memory coupled to minimal visual data.
• When coming into the National Gallery, I recognise the gallery space, that I see a painting on a wall in a frame, that it is made of paint, that it is a cathedral and that it is a Monet. All these things I recognise (pretty much) simultaneously, one might take slightly more precedence over the other in terms of conceptual dominance, but none completely effaces the other. They all exist together.
• Thus the experience of looking at the painting might be termed 'multifold' (as opposed to 'twofold') since the object and environment are recognised at the same time the referential content is.
• One could say that the peculiar nature of pictorial representations is that one recognises at least two things at once (simultaneously). The material from which the picture is made and what it represents. If we are presented with sufficient visual cues then we have no choice but to recognise an object being represented. Yet we do not cease to recognise the substrate (except on very special occasions, i.e. Gijsbreachts and Gavin Turk).
• The peculiar nature of pictorial representations is that we recognise several things occuring coterminously, or coincidentally. When we see a fruit on a branch we recognise it as fruit in a straightforward way. When we see a representation of fruit on a branch we recognise the fruit, but also the medium of its representation — at the same time. We may also recognise the style, or the artist, or the significance of the picture, thus multiplying the richness of the aesthetic experience.
