From T.J. Clark’s Heaven on Earth: Painting and the Life to Come (pg 135):
Paintings are not propositions: they do not take the form of image-sentences. They are not even like propositions. That is, they do no aim to make statements or ask questions or even, precisely, to seek assent. They are best not seen, it follows, as strings of individual image-elements or phonemes, arranged according to some overall grammar, out of which a governing meaning is generated for the array as a whole – maybe a complex or ambiguous one, but nonetheless a meaning derived from a knowable lexicon and a set of combinatory or semantic rules. Naturally a painting ‘takes a view’ of things; it adopts an attitude to them; it discriminates and prioritizes, putting a small world in order. But this is not the order of the linguistics. It is an ordering of things more open and centrifugal – more non-committal – than grammar can almost ever countenance.
Extracts 