Frances muses with Luis and others... The limiting of graphic or plastic or tectonic space, by the cropping and scaling and closing of visible objects like depicted images, is indeed probably a mental act of gestalt perception and vision, but may not fully account for ancient works like primitive drawings and carvings and buildings that were put on rocks or in caves, where edges and frames may not actually exist in concrete fact. The deliberate imposition of peripheral restrictions on aesthetic forms like tones or marks can even be a block to understanding artistic goodness. In semiotics however the determination of semantic grounds and margins is required for signers to interpret the referents and meanings of objects or subjects that may be signified by signs. Such boundaries act as limiting spheres and domains and realms, whereby the signer can be brought into a conforming and controlling relation with the sign, so that some degree of normality is assured. There is also a key difference to note in pragmatist semiotics between a visible material object and a visual mental object. Furthermore, such semiotics holds that when a delimiting frame is present to sense, that it is itself a further sign that impacts on the signing and the signed and the signer. To be specific, a frame or boarder is mainly an "indexic" kind of sign, and not mainly an "iconic" or "symbolic" kind of sign, although these three semiotic properties will be present in all kinds of signs, regardless of their main dominance in any particular situation of semiosis. The issue of whether such peripheries are necessary subjective dispositions discovered by humans as inborn traits, or rather are arbitrary subjective conventions invented by humans as learned trails or trials, is another important thorn to deal with.
Luis Fontanills of ManFont wrote... One should understand that the most important aspect of the picture frame and or edges of the canvas is to delimit perceptual space in order to heighten awareness of the thing itself - isolate it, to some degree, from its surroundings. This technique of delimiting perceptual space (perceptual cropping) is probably as old as human consciousness and is useful in all the visual arts including architecture.
