Art and Experience, Utrecht, © 1996. All rights reserved

Expression is the experiential dimension intimated by an artistic presentation. Everyday mental states 'hiding' behind gestural or facial expressions are accessible to embodied perception. Such expressions when reproduced need a supplementary act of empathetic imagination for their constitution. Due to art's restricted address of polymodality a work of art's expression never is reducible to real life expression because it involves the experiential dimension of the artist's manipulations with the material of his work. As such, both the recognition of artistic expression and the recognition of represented experience (on the basis of intimation) are the business of empathetic imagination. Cf. Goodman's notion of metaphorical exemplification; Elliott.(I:7; VII:5).