How Colour Rhetoric is Used to Persuade: Chromatic Argumentation in Visual Statements

Abstract

Aristotle’s Rhetoric is the most ancient work exposing a technique to persuade, to promote adhesion by means of reasons that could be more or less logical or credible. In order to argue in favour or against something, it was necessary to employ a technique to find out ‘what to say’ (the appropriate arguments) and ‘how to say’ those ideas. The part of rhetoric dealing with the figures of discourse used to persuade (how to say) is called elocutio, in Latin. Many years ago, the analysis of rhetoric figures was extended and generalised to explain in aesthetic and creative uses of language, its poetic function. The deviations that appear in creative texts, as compared to the ordinary use of language, correspond to large repertoire of rhetorical figures that the studies in poetics coined along centuries. Usually, it is considered that its field is ‘poetics and figured speed’; however, these operations extend to all kinds of discourses and languages. Artistic images painting, architecture, photography, caricature, cartoons, advertising and many other genres of visual production base their efficacy on the rhetorical use of visual signs. This paper analyses how the use of colour can be a privileged element to argue in a visual image. The values and connotations attributed to colour in the context of visual statements work as ‘proof’ in persuasive discourse. By this means, the use of rhetorical figures is not an end in itself; it is the visible correlation of the argumentation that works as an implicit frame in persuasion.