Galicia PAU Art Foundations key terms

Arrangement that directs attention among elements through scale, contrast, placement or other relationships rather than assigning everything equal prominence.

A colour attribute used to distinguish families such as red, green or blue, separately from lightness and saturation.

Relative lightness or darkness of a visual element, which can create contrast independently of its hue or symbolic associations.

Degree of chromatic intensity or neutrality in a colour, distinct from its lightness and from the colour family itself.

Mixing coloured light, commonly modeled with red, green and blue channels; distinguish it from ink or pigment absorption.

Colour formation through selective absorption by materials; printing commonly uses cyan, magenta and yellow with an additional black channel.

Organization of visual elements within a work, studied through relationships of balance, direction, emphasis, rhythm, scale and space.

Representation in which parallel object edges remain parallel in the drawing, with axis conventions determining angles and scale factors.

Representation based on projection from a viewpoint, in which relevant sets of parallel lines can converge toward vanishing points.

Identification of represented subjects and attributes using appropriate contextual evidence, rather than a universal dictionary of isolated symbols.

Documented history of an object’s origin, custody and movement; it is evidence to assess rather than a substitute for analysis.

Material or technical means through which a work is made, distinguished from its support, subject and proposed interpretation.

Construction that combines attached fragments into a new arrangement; the source materials and their changed relationships contribute to meaning.

An existing manufactured object selected or presented in an artistic context, raising questions about authorship, recognition, function and interpretation.

Cultural production and circulation addressed to broad audiences through reproducible media, without implying uniform audience responses or identical values.

Reuse or transformation of existing cultural material, whose meaning depends on the new context, attribution, purpose and relevant constraints.

Work organized through objects, media or spatial relationships that shape the viewer’s experience of a particular arranged environment.

Artistic practice involving actions in time, whose documentation and live realization can have different roles within the work.

Practices giving a central role to an idea, proposition or procedure; material objects can still participate in their presentation.

Artistic practices engaging imagery and forms of popular or consumer culture, with attitudes that must be argued work by work.

Organization of separate images or shots into relationships that can construct sequence, contrast or association rather than merely reproduce continuity.

Sound belonging to the represented story world, which may originate on screen or outside the visible frame.

Sound presented outside the represented story world, such as a musical score whose source is not part of the scene.

Selection and organization of what an image includes and excludes; it shapes attention without making every depicted claim automatically true.

Relationship in which accompanying text helps direct interpretation of an image, while its effect still depends on context and audience.

A representation or copy of another work or image, which should be distinguished from the original object and accurately described.

Study of perceptible relationships such as line, colour, scale, light and space, linked to specific evidence rather than unexplained adjectives.

Artistic examination of the structures, values and conditions of institutions that present or authorize culture, requiring attention to the specific work.