An Exhibition of Monotypes by

STEFAN ARTENI

East and West. Allegories

Kobe Art Hall

Japan
(September 25-30, 1997)

2010
In allegory the observer is confronted with the
facies hippocratica of history, a petrified
primordial landscape.

Walter Benjamin
Allegory: impersonated abstractions, expounded by emblems

[ allos: other; agoria: speaking ]

The disclosure of existential-aesthetic structures occurs in a

transversal play across horizons of pictorial multiplicities (Deleuze),
antecedent as well as co-present (Plato's anamnestic imperative
and Kierkegaard's recollecting forward). Painting is both Hermetic
and Dionysiac, an Odyssey (Schelling), a quest ever underway,
generating self-referring worlds out of itself. It is defined
by relations between its elements as well as relations to other
works (Deleuze). It arises from a play, which, the more richly
it unfolds, the more strictly it is bound by its hidden rule.
The bricoleur (Levy-Strauss) strives to elicit order from ruins.
[ Nostalgia. From nostos: return home; algos: pain ]
 It is, it was, it is not; it came, it was, and
it is nothing.
Then it returns to nothing, that which was nothing
before.

Conrad of Fabaria
 But friend, we come too late: it is true the gods
still live
But above our heads, over there in another world.
They still
have effects over there without end and seem
to care little
whether we live; so much do the heavenly
ones leave us.

Friedrich Hölderlin