Myriam S.- P.

de Arteni

The Pluriverse of Stefan Arteni’s

Painting
II

SolInvictus Press 2006

He who refuses does not repent. Should he be asked again,
he would say no again. And yet that no --
the right no -- crushes him for the rest of his life.

C. P. Cavafy

Note: the illustrations reproduce works by Stefan Arteni

 …you break up the distinction and it
turns into a Fibonacci series…
G. Spencer-Brown

An artist uses “ a stock of forms, emptied of their charge”, writes Jacques Maritain, “to
be used for articulating the painting according to the infallible rules corresponding to
the contingency of each work, rules relative to the exigencies, nature, and formal
conditions of the work”.

Calling to mind Gotthard Guenther’s multi-valued logic and its relation to the
configurationality of the visual, one may speak of a series of operations that constitute
themselves into a self-referential and recursive process. “Kenogrammatics is a trans-
semiotic, pre-signifying, pre-speech, non-expressive economy of incisions, of ultra-
indicators”, write R. Kaehr and J. Ditterich, that is the empty loci that merely indicate
organization and structure and which are identified with structural invariance within the
realm of sign difference or equivalence, the empty slots where semiotic processes can
be inserted, or the self-referential and recursive process that Arteni calls kenosyntax,
the mechanism of all relational and operational orders. Relative to the empty place the
actual content inserted is entirely contingent. In Nina Ort’s systems theoretical
language, the distinction distinguishes and indicates only differences.

Operationally this means using the empty structures of kenosyntax, that is to say, "To the mathematical concept of
either the Golden Section - also called Golden Ratio or Sectio Aurea - and its transformability corresponds the
properties of self-similarity, or the musical consonances of Alberti, as well as the perceptual concept of transposability".
interlinking of planes and/or the perspective systems as organizing systems - all Ernst Cassirer
explored by Evaristo Baschenis, Jan Vermeer, Juan Gris, Gino Severini, Serge
Poliakoff, and Jacques Villon - or polyperspective systems. It means using the
organizing of color relations in all their complexity - investigated by Jacques Villon and
Raoul Dufy, among others - and the transposition, in a musical sense, of color
scales. It also means the use of dissonances, following in the footsteps of Hugo van der
Goes, Rosso Fiorentino and El Greco.

Kenosyntax describes a pre-semiotic domain. The epistemological import would be, in

the words of Peer F. Bundgaard, the unity of a space, the pictorial space, within the
same logic of determination.
 For the Gods, it seems, love the
obscure and hate the obvious.
Brhadaranyaka Upanishad

Arteni concurs with Aby Warburg that mythopoietic culture is being transmitted by
images, prior to any verbal development - Stefania Caliandro’s ‘metavisual’ reflexion.
Homo pictor philomythos makes the uncanny familiar by projecting ritualized schemata.
Hans Blumenberg speaks of a ‘magical and ritual quid pro quo’, the calling forth of that
which emerges and abides, the mystery of the artistic play and its productive ambiguity.

The play of themes and variations, Arteni’s Mythologic Compositions, and the
contemporaneous Bacchanals, summon up the art of unreality as means of self-defence:
Dionysos, born of the moon, is the one marked by the fatality of history and by the
lurking self-alienation, the technician and spectator – but not the mortal participant - in
the play of the world.

Why myth? In the words of Mircea Eliade, “seasonal festivals and folklores are a creation "The past is not dead, it's not even
in which eschatology and soteriology are given cosmic dimensions…it is a passive revolt past".
against the tragedy…of History”. In East-Central Europe, the ‘pagan’ survives, either William Faulkner
camouflaged or transformed.

Arteni suggests that “imagination embodies the temporal play of presence and absence,
the tension between logos and mythos within a polyvalent, multivocal context, and
transposes this tension into a vortex of differentiation from which arise new idioms. Myth
points to the archaic reformation of the world, the delimitation of boundaries to develop
order from chaos”. The artist’s energy, as Nietzsche emphasizes, the polymorphic play
of the artist and the fusion of prophecy and tradition, imitates the Dyonisian movement of
rebirth and death, regeneration and corruption, in the manner of Mnemosyne, of
memory, of the memorializing act.

Arteni’s ability to seek in apparently incompatible approaches a deeper nexus of thinking,

is related to his investigation of image theory, phenomenology, autopoietic-, cognitive-,
and systems theories, information-, reception-, and neuro-aesthetics, Ernst Cassirer’s
theory of symbolic forms and Jan Assmann’s examination of cultural memory, radical
constructivist epistemology, transclassic logic, and visual semiotics. Arteni’s essays are
published on his Web Site .His essay on Calligraphy is among the topics of the Chinese
Society for Aesthetics’ Congress, October 2002.
 …the break between color and
language…color is unsayable.
J.– Claude Piguet

In a painting by Arteni, one finds an intensely satisfying, hermetic relationship of pictorial

elements. He starts with a complete architecture and adds yet more complexity, until the
subtlety of resonance reaches an exquisite pitch.
“The painting is built on series of visual rhymes”, Arteni declares, “a system of
correspondences, the mixed and fragmentary reality of a synecdochic, metonymic,
homomorphic, pseudomorphic, often paratactic, process. Pictorial iconic aggregates are
activated in the operational appropriative present as pictograms and ideograms”. Sylistic
codes wear out by use, says Itamar Even-Zohar, through automatization, de-iconization,
de-referentialization. The reactivation of iconographic constructs, freed from the semiotic
labyrinth and pragmatic embedding, will constitute, according to Hans Belting, a virtual-
or pseudo-iconography.

Arteni’s organization of color offers contrast by layering, juxtaposition, junctures, and

conjunctions, that are specifically visible by their effect. The artist has noticed, along with
Raoul Dufy and Semir Zeki, that there is a perceptual asynchrony of color and outline,
while, in the words of Semir Zeki, “color constancy is the most important property of the
color system”. In Arteni’s works, the play of color explores dissonance, assonance, and
consonance. Color rhymes unite different spatial elements: it is the topological pictorial
space described by Svend Ostergaard, the play-space of accord and discontinuity
between the local and the global.

When we perceive an object…the brain

sees color first, before form or movement.
Semir Zeki

Niklas Luhmann speaks of a symbolic art concerned with the unity of the difference
between accessible and inaccessible. The symbol marks the inaccessible within the
realm of the accessible. Using systems-theoretical terms, it is a form of re-entry of a
distinction into what it distinguishes. “Religion may well do without theology, but it cannot
exist without art…”, writes Moisey S. Kagan. “Art is unlike religion only because it does
not ask that her works be taken for reality. And when myth, icon, or church are
deconsecrated, these works become simply works of art”.

Neuroaesthetics has investigated the primacy of color perception. Arteni’s Icons series is "…color est lux…".
built around the Byzantine color code, - ‘Byzantium ‘ is here understood as a cultural Robert Grosseteste
space - each work being usually based on dyads of complementary colors or on triads.
Speaking of the semiotics of Icons, Dragan Milivojevic writes that color is not a sign
by itself, it has to relate to a context to obtain its full significance, in which case
color is a twice removed sign and therefore of an higher order on the symbolic
level. Its significance “is affirmed within a purely semiotic (in this case liturgical)
field…”, says Jean-Luc Marion.

Cognitive psychology admits two kinds of vision: preattentive processes and focal "For me, to conceive a form, is to
attention. How should an Icon be looked at? Pavel Florenskii describes a sort of perceive a color…".
contemplative gazing as cognitive process. It is known that through its inverse Marino Marini
perspective, the Icon includes the audience space, the space in front of the work.
The colors of the Icon are directed ‘towards’ the recipient, the painting itself is the
source of the light that emanates from the colors: a ‘lighting-from-within’ works as
an ‘emanated light’. Arteni agrees with Wolfgang Schoene that “light metaphysic or
light ontology are more fitting concepts than light symbolism”, and that in the Icon,
light appears as a spiritual, not an optical, reality.

Alexei Jawlensky, the creator of the modern Icon, said that the painting itself
becomes prayer. The artistic praxis becomes ritual. Color is no longer descriptive,
iconic aggregates lose their identity and turn into color-figuration. In fact, it is visual
competence that is needed; James R. Hurford remarks that iconic images tend to
turn into Peircean symbols when they are employed frequently and based on a
rule-system. Arteni’s works, his Icons interpretations, are constructed in analogy to
a musical composition. The works are designed to be variations, vivacissimo, upon
themes already familiar. Figures and themes appear transmuted.

Many works employ Aristotelian space, described by Patrick A. Heelan as finite in

size, progressively shallow, where objects are stacked on an all-enclosing
spherical backdrop. This is why distant objects may look larger and nearer.

Parallel contemporaneous series are based on Western religious iconographic

constructs. The signifying relation needs a guarantee in the work’s resemblance to
what it signifies, although Arteni extends the process to a sometimes ironic
inter-iconic and stylistic interpretive citation game. “Art is nourished by art”, writes
André Malraux.
Arteni’s almost randomly assembled preliminary collage studies may in fact generate a
thematic or stylistic variety of series and sub-series if and when finally crystallizing into
specific iconic systems that will be suggested by the distribution and structure of the
collage’s formants. Only the playing of the game can generate the rules. The form of
citation, even if subjected to medium related interpretation and transposition, indicates
that the diversity of works is emphasized; it is a case of the art system’s memory being
formalized as information, that is to say, hetero-reference. Ironic and strangely rendered
stylistic quotations indicate the stylistic levels underlying certain formal constraints. The
tradition of citation and appropriation in painting is a time-tested one: it is worth pointing
out Velasquez and Manet as distinguished examples.
 Pictorial space is a wall inside which,
however, birds fly freely.
Nicolas de Staël

Since the late 1980s, Arteni devotes himself to exploring in depth the art of East Asian
calligraphy - he studies with Professor Yusho Tanaka (Setsuzan), one of Japan's
leading calligraphy Masters - concurrent with expanding the formal horizon of his
painting on the basis of the principle of synchronous, open series. At the same time, he
is engaged in seeking a plural path. One outcome will be his livres d’artiste.

There is also another dimension relevant to Arteni’s art. Governed by a potent and
visionary virtuosity, Arteni brings together disparate elements, from allusions to Greek
and Roman Art to the twilight of the Classical World, from reminiscences of Byzantine
mosaics to Far Eastern calligraphy, recomposing them in versions of tactile and
synthetic form - the gestural material, monumental regardless of size, a sense of
underlying architectural order. Arteni’s art is now made for an ideal destination, the large
wall. Mural Art is bound up with space, it requires not only seeing, but a movement of
walking about.

Arteni successfully resolves the problem of intertwining two seemingly irreconcilable

poles, the European (both Eastern and Western) and the East Asian. It is within the
formal domain of East Asian calligraphy that a strong tradition of stylistic interpretive
citation comes to the fore. The mutation of Arteni’s own heritage through the strategic
appropriation of the East Asian artistic matrix develops into process-oriented,
spontaneous methods.

Once again, the ancient theoria (viewing, contemplating) is sought as fulfillment in the
entwined multi-agent heterarchy, the coordination, distribution and operational order
mediation of artistic domains or contextures that require a multiplicity of simultaneous
points of view, opening up access to new equally valid outlooks. Admittedly, the
systematic consistency of the idea of ‘polycontexturality’, to borrow another term from
Gotthard Guenther, can be confirmed in Arteni’s work as a whole.
 Gathered in itself, the beginning and
the end of the circle is the same.
Heraclitus

The Icon is intended to encourage meditation and therefore calls to mind Buddhism and
Zen. The Greek word for ‘revelation’ itself implies a veiling rather than a disclosure.
Arteni’s Apocalypse Triptych is concurrent with the clay monotypes on the same theme,
and the numerous related autonomous studies conceived as a ‘Wall of Paintings’. Arteni
applies himself to elucidating the twentieth century utopia and Apocalypse, the rise and
fall of absolute abstract ideologies, and, in Kim Levin’s words, the Apocalypse of art.
Edward W. Said speaks of a ‘voyage inward’. There is no creation, there is no way of
being what one actually is, except through ensimismamiento, Jose Ortega y Gasset’s
concept that is the despair of translators. It literally means within-one-self-ness. Christoph
Doswald names the process ‘recontextualization of traces’. Michel de Certeau sees the
‘art of the weak’ as that very weakness that is strength when inscribed in time.

The Allegories series of monumental monotypes is based on the Baroque Iconologia of

the Italian knight Cesare Ripa, a compilation of allegories extensively used by artists in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Visual memory is populated by characteristic
structures. The creative process is dependent on preknowledge of style. By transcending
and transforming the images, Arteni creates works incorporating both iconic aggregate
and script as pictorial form, works that could be perceived as Nihonga, the Japanese style
of ink painting. Arteni is mindful of Hans Blumenberg’s metaphorology concept, the
symbolic forms of pre-conceptual expressions. “The absolute metaphor structures the
world”, writes Blumenberg, “it represents the never cognizable, never graspable, totality of
reality”. More precisely, in the case of allegory, which is usually a personification with
attributes, it may be said that the polyvalent sense of the image is made visible by the
use of metonimy and sinecdoche. This interpretation can be squared with Arteni’s
Orpheus mural project and related studies.

Hermes is the god of paths, the journeyer at home while underway. The sum total of
pathways is Hermes’ playground, where the accidental – finding, appropriating, the
Hermetic event - is transformed into a work of art. A fundamental series of large size
monotypes are the Scroll Fragments, calligraphic paintings that incorporate idiolectal
pictographic aggregates, a series parallel to the monumental Calligraphies.
Studies, intended as elaborations of larger works, but treated as autonomous, are built of
an abundant, thick and dense material. One should take into account that these projects
are complete in themselves, that they are perfected operations. Göran Sonesson defines
pictorial strategies of rhetoric as consisting, on the one hand, of levels of unreality, and,
on the other hand, of visual paraphrases that create tension between fictional levels:
materiality, iconic aggregates, inter-iconic citations and transmutations, all play a role.
“Every picture is rhetorical”, he writes. “[It creates] an impression of similarity on the
background of a fundamental difference”.
 Know, brother, that even if we cannot
enter the Promised Land, it is better for us
to die in the wilderness than to return to Egypt.
From the Ancient Sinai Paterikon

As one begins to comprehend the complexities of a canvas by Arteni, new qualities

emerge: logic of approach, an ability to balance two- and three-dimensional aspects, the
abstract construction of form, the ritual character of compositions, color virtuosity, the
colors acting on their own, to which one adds tonal painting, polyrhythm, and the value of
the stroke, the play of transclassic polycontexturality, and, to use Christoph Zuercher’s
concept, the creation of a virtual space of ‘re-traditionalisation’. One can also speak here
of an aesthetics of visual fragments where cultural memory crystallizes itself, a kind of
chain reaction exploring the multifaceted relationship between remembering, forgetting,
and the pathways of alterity.

It is an art that affirms Michel de Certeau’s concept of heterology, the time and locus of
altered alterity, of the boundary crosser, the stranger, the vestigial, multiform, allotropic,
under-defined, under-determined post-utopia other who constantly harbors suspicion of the
verbal screen, the one who lacks a place and autochthony, the homelandless ever atopos.

.
Myriam S.- P. de Arteni