Spanish term (edited): Figuración

The origin is Spanish and it means "Figuration".
It has a deep religious meaning, related to the Virgin Mary.
For instance:
http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol2-1998/n8mandoki
The first chapter 'Spilt Color/Blur', an analysis of Paris Bordone's painting _A Chess Game_ using a semiotic frame related to the Tel Quel circle (Sollers, Derrida, Kristeva, Barthes) is hard to follow, since we lack an illustration of such work to help the reader through this arduous first encounter with Schefer's style of thinking and writing. Schefer proposes a non-systematic, non-methodological alternative to the semiological and iconographical analyses of painting used by Panofsky and other traditional art historians. He establishes a distinction between figuration and representation which may be worthwhile, not only for the analysis of color, but also of volume and even gesture in visual arts. Representation, according to Schefer, is systematic, and involves aspects such as perspective and the hierarchical arrangement of images; it emphasizes the signifier in Saussure's sense of the term. Figuration, on the other hand, is more on the side of the signified, as with the meanings attached to an image in pagan societies. In the second chapter, Schefer finds in Ucello's paintings a subversion of representation and a quest for what representation cannot figure or configure over the body. The third chapter is consistent with the same inquiry, now exploring Poussin's _The Arcadian Shepherds_, and how the body disappears as it is being represented due to the conventions of representation itself. As Goethe used to say about scientists 'you murder to dissect', Schefer somehow claims that painting 'murders to represent'. What is left by the representation of the body is for Schefer something more like a corpse within which we hope to catch it betraying itself and revealing some truth or beauty. The fourth chapter, centered around Uccello's fresco _The Flood_ (illustrated with a very low quality of printing), is particularly hard to follow as theory and perhaps better approached as literature. Schefer has stimulating intuition and he's sure that he is after something, but does not seem to care much about others that arrive at his writings from different backgrounds. His confused writing is probably an index of confused thinking; he has his question more or less clear, but his answers are far from convincing.