Color Semiotics from a Peircean Perspective in Interpreting the Hidden Meanings of Crisis-Oriented Murals in Tehran (2017–2026)

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

1 Department of the Art Research, Faculty of Alzahra University, P.O. Box: 1639-11155, Tehran, Iran

2 Department of Painting, Faculty of Arts, Alzahra University, P.O. Box: 1639-11155, Tehran, Iran

10.30509/jcst.2026.167859.1291

Abstract

Murals, as an integral part of urban culture and art, play a role in representing collective experiences and shared values and shaping citizens’ perceptions of crises. This study aims to examine the role of color semiotics in the representation and reception of the overt and covert meanings of crisis-oriented murals in Tehran, across three categories of crises: urban, international, and national. Drawing on Peircean semiotics, the study investigates how colors are organized and how they contribute to the foregrounding or downplaying of meanings. The main hypothesis is that color palettes in Tehran’s crisis-oriented murals represent crises and foreground or downplay certain meanings through the organization of color signs. The findings indicate that colors, through the interaction of iconic, indexical, and symbolic signs, contribute to representing the characteristics and consequences of crises and evoking collective values. Furthermore, the foregrounding of epic and heroic concepts in some murals reinforces feelings of pride and collective solidarity. Accordingly, the meanings of color signs are shaped in relation to the cultural and social context of murals, and neither their semiotic meanings nor the artist’s intentions can be determined conclusively on the basis of quantitative color characteristics alone. Given the archival nature of the images and the use of the K-means algorithm to extract dominant colors in the RGB color space, the quantitative color results were interpreted with caution and treated as descriptive indicators of the images’ color composition for assessing perceptual differences in color. Overall, the findings demonstrate that Tehran’s crisis-oriented murals draw on the potential of color semiotics not only to represent crises but also to foreground and select particular meanings.

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References

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