The observer of a painting is a reader and, as such, is considered a co-enunciator who presents him/herself as a filter of the persuasive strategies of the painter-enunciator. However, the painting may be composite and become a visual-verbal text, one on which verbal formulations added by the painter himself stand out. Being accountable for the interpretation of the content of these syncretic texts, the reader-observer is affected by the plastic organization resulting from the intersection of the two manifested languages, the verbal and visual ones. These languages, "blended" in their own way onto the materiality of the canvas, project a certain sensitive inclination toward the body of the beholder. Based on studies by Floch (1987), Badir (2009) and Zilberberg (2011) - authors whose reflections align with the so-called Paris School of Semiotics - we will discuss the relationship between the visual and the verbal in this syncretism, which is expected to construct style vectors. We will bring to light paintings by José Antônio da Silva (1909-1996), a Brazilian artist classified as "naïf": a painter who printed verbal segments on the surface of some of his paintings, in attempt to aestheticize the passions of revolt and serenity experienced in everyday life. Alongside the works of José Antônio da Silva, we will analyse mechanisms for the construction of meaning found in the Argentinean artist León Ferrari (1920 - 2013)’s paintings, especially those in which the artist inscribes sentences in Braille onto images of saints retrieved from religious discourse. From the comparison between the visual-verbal paintings by the Brazilian artist and the Argentinean one, two different modes of presence are likely to emerge for the observer, which will make up two different reading keys foreseen within the observed works. Meanwhile, the way to construct the visual-verbal syncretism will forge spaces of displacement or rest for the reader-observer, which will depend on the style of each painter. The style of printing sentences on pictures may (or may not) lead the reader to the experience of synesthesia, which, together with the visual-verbal syncretism, will promote an increase in emotion or a strengthened tonicity of aesthetic perception.