Myriam S.- P.

de Arteni

The Pluriverse of Stefan Arteni’s

Painting
I

SolInvictus Press 2006

When you start on your journey to Ithaca,
then pray that the road is long,
full of adventure, full of knowledge…

Ithaca has given you the beautiful voyage.

Without her you would have never set out on the road.
She has nothing more to give you…
C. P. Cavafy

Note: the illustrations reproduce works by Stefan Arteni

 All that art is capable of is to grieve
for the sacrifice it makes and which
it itself, in its powerlessness, is.
Theodor Adorno

Stefan Arteni was born in 1947 in Bucharest, at a geographical and historical crossroads of "Any descent into hell could be
civilizations, languages, and nations. At that point in time, modernity had reached the zenith endured if only a paradise of
of its fortunes. It is the heyday of ideological-aesthetic modernism which, as Boris Groys culture were possible".
notes, negates cultural identities and treats memory as non-binding and erasable. Jacques Constantin Noica
Derrida emphasizes the dissolution of the concept of art. Even an extended canonical
modernist model, a ‘conversation’ of cultures, serves to subtly overpower the other. Markus
Steimayr speaks of a desire to extinguish cultural memory.

Dragan Kujundzic describes the apocalyptic dimension of that ultra-modernist project known "Simulativeness (the symbols for
in the twentieth century as Socialist Realism, noting that totalitarianism is a making of the things become more real than
unified visual and imaginative space, motivated by a totalist drive to overcome the difference the things themselves) is one of
between art and life. Boris Groys has analyzed this aestheticization of the political, a the primary characteristics of
phenomenon which, to a certain extent, brings to mind Nietzsche’s notion of the ‘will to power postmodernism, and is an
as art’. Groys writes: “History ended…in post-historical reality everything was inseparable companion of every
new…Therefore, that aesthetic had no need to strive to be formally new, its novelty was type of ideologically saturated
already guaranteed by the total newness of its content”. Such a project based on the art".
primordiality of ‘new’ content continues in the postmodern era. Ants Juske

On the other hand, Niklas Luhmann remarks that “good form destroys information”.
Moreover, the concrete character of the artistic form constitutes an alternative path, the way
of form. One should not forget Stéphane Mallarmé’s words: “All mastery casts a chill”.
A solitary, characterized by a single-minded, even militant, dedication to painting, Arteni
develops his research tenaciously on the margins, exploring and making use of overlapping
paradigms, seeking an alternative to ‘official’, canonized, monologic cultural-artistic systems.
What unfolds is the crossroads, the clusters of boundaries and the transgressive boundary
crossings. We should accent the unified yet heterogenous elements, the attunement to
formal, artistic domains. His is an art which investigates the past by looking upon it not
melancholically, as a golden age never again to be realized, but as a ‘present past’, as an
exemplary parallel to the present.
 It is enough that one man has
sailed past the Sirens.
Clement of Alexandria

“Europe is a container of identites, a sedimental layering of cultures past and present”, "Cultures, semantic,
remarks Eric Kluitenberg. Steven Toetoesy de Zepetnek depicts East-Central Europe as an epistemological communities,
area “in-between peripherality”, caught “between the local cultural self-referentiality and the serve as… pools of
influences of the major cultures on whose periphery it exists”. This follows from historical distinctions…and any of these
marginalization – the aggregate of territories is situated in the no-man’s land lying between, is highly normatively
and exposed to being subject of, colliding empires - and from the extensive exile and oriented".
diaspora phenomenon of the twentieth century, an age cast up by a cataclysmic upheaval, S.J.Schmidt
the age of Ulysses or ‘no one’, the age of outcasts, vagantes, pilgrims without a destination,
the travelling players. “We are cultural hybrids”, writes Wolfgang Welsch, wanderers beyond
local cultures, between cultures, between languages and sign systems, transcultural
migrants between the poles of cultural alterity and forced belonging.

East-Central European cultures fit with difficulty Procustean classifications. “Cultural

memory”, writes Jan Assmann, “implies that we possess history as we remember it –
selectively, as members of a group and impelled by the desire to appropriate the past in
order to solidify present identity…We need a sphere reaching over the horizon of our mortal
Dasein, in order to live with this knowledge and remain in a state of balance”. The often
polylingual individual turns unavoidable cultural hybridization into a survival strategy.
Maturana’s ‘structural drift’ thus occurs due to the constant supply of perturbations from
various sources.

Arteni’s painting lets shine forth a fate that always plays out a collage of fragmented "The bit of noise, the small
inheritances, truncated legacies, successive presents and non-localisable connections. Its random element, transforms one
points of contact with diverse idiomatic styles derive in each case from formal requirements. system of order into another".
To borrow a fitting formulation by Michel Serres, there is, however, no message across Michel Serres
divides without unpredictable ‘background’ noise or interference that potentially distorts it,
especially when mediated in the form of translation. The channel breaks the flow: dis-
placement.

Utopian desecration and destruction, the shattering of many illusions, no longer allows faith in
any concept of progress but only a sense of searching deeper. Arteni evolved a pessimistic
and skeptical awareness of the mental life of an epoch, and the transient course of history. It
appears that no work from before 1971, the year Arteni went to Rome, has survived.
 Theorem and theatre have the same
root…It is the spectacle that we
see…
G. Spencer-Brown

Evolutionarily, perception is the primary and most widespread mode of information, and only in
few cases it is condensed into communication. While animals react to signals and are thus tied
to the signalized world, writes Arnold Gehlen, man creates symbols and manipulates symbols
instead of objects.

Seen systems-theoretically, “representation has a dual meaning: the ability to portray and the
ability to make present”, writes Niklas Luhmann. “Signs are also forms, that means marked
distinctions…In the form of the sign, that means in the relation between signifier and signified,
there are referents: the signifier signifies the signified. But the form itself…has no reference; it
functions only as a distinction, and that only when it is actually used as such”.

“Visual art originates when the compound activity of doing, and the making of things, grows into
a system: it is an activity directed to an object – contingent facticity and visible presence”,
remarks Arteni. “There is a sort of circularity, the works circle round a basic, pre-objective world
belonging to the myths of culture, a constitutive anamnesis”. Needless to say, a different
conception of the artwork is involved here, i.e. its two-dimensional appearance, the pre-semiotic
presentation level that, in Svend Ostergaard’s view, conflicts with representation. In Luhmannian
terminology, the first distinction demarcates the field that is prepared for a painting. The work will
emerge only within the boundaries of this primary form. Only internal operations are possible –
by distinguishing system from environment they make indications that refer either to themselves
or the outside world.

The painting becomes a system of processes. Meaning consists of a reference surplus

emerging from the differences of selected, coupled, and compared distinct forms, e.g. colors,
which will draw perceptual, notational, or spatial distinctions within the work. The importance of
the work as a physical entity is meant to exceed its function as a medium of representation.
Residual structures, realistic figures, and abstract compositions, all find continuity in the
statement of the pictorial problem. For Arteni, that course is essentially visual and tactile. “The
visual brain is one third of our entire brain…”, writes Semir Zeki.
 The greatest effort that can be asked
from a man is to be what he is. If he
does that, he is an inhuman being.
Paul Valery

Arteni’s sense of culture is already substantially well defined, nurtured by an interest in

Hesychasm, and a few Masters of Classical Modernism ( Nicolas De Staël and Serge
Poliakoff - the Byzantine Icon, i.e. color, is the backdrop of their work - Marino Marini and
Mario Sironi), and by a passion for Zen and Far Eastern Calligraphy. The artist’s travels
further nurture his predilection for the Museum as a place of meditation and not of
self-identification. Arteni expands the horizon of his professional training by studying
with Professor Luigi Montanarini at the Roman Accademia di Belle Arti.

To paint is to participate in history, whether with or against the past. Being aware of the
problem of the avant-garde, which must always move beyond itself, and its intrinsically
self-destructive qualities, Arteni remains aloof from the aesthetic movements of his time,
their deadening congealment, and their shift in attention to and ceaseless pursuit of an
utopic, ever-escaping future.

By necessity, one of Arteni’s principal goals is the reconciliation and integration of the
painting process with the great painting tradition, a dialogue with and revitalization of
traditional technical sources regarding grounds, mediums, varnishes, paint formulations and
ways of use, an unavoidable dialogue with contemporary color manufacturers, and the
investigation of the scientific methods for identifying pigments and mediums in paint samples.
The results of Arteni’s research are published in numerous conference proceedings, such as
the Reports of the International Council of Museums. In his paintings, Arteni maintains a rich,
tactile surface, through the use of areas that rhyme with one another texturally. The ancient
name for craftsman, cheironax, means ‘lord of the hands’.

Arteni grasped the possibility of iconography evocative of past cultures, but working with the
past to proceed in the present, selecting iconographic and stylistic elements with an eye to
constructs, making use of both Classical Modernist advances and art historical revivals,
making the modern ancient, turning it into ruin. The materiality of signs allows their recycling
through transposition and transformation, even mutilation, writes Willie van Peer, although
their interpretation may thus become difficult.
Features of a thematic nature tend to appear and become important for the subsequent
evolution and gradual formation of Arteni’s personal vocabulary. Most fecund is the
tradition of Dutch Still Life , within which allegorical subjects often occur - the Vanitas
and the Monochrome Banquets - especially the works of Willem Claesz. Heda, Pieter
Claesz., Gerrit W. Heda, and Willem Kalf. Arteni also chooses to concentrate on the
research pursued by André Derain, both in the genre of Still Life and of the complex
polyphonic composition. The pure painterliness of Greek vases and of Diego Velasquez,
the multi-varied black of Frans Hals, the compositions of Nicolas Poussin, the line
arabesque of Lucas Cranach, Sandro Boticelli, and Amedeo Modigliani, should also be
mentioned, as well as the color of Pierre Bonnard and Georges Rouault, and the grays of
Giorgio Morandi. Somewhat such, however imperfectly sketched, are Arteni’s teachers. In
1977, Arteni moved to New York.

Hetero-reference is reduced to a play

with art’s own history, or with the
material used by art itself.
Niklas Luhmann

Starting from a lexic of signs originated in Byzantine, Mannierist, and Baroque "The true activity of life is that of the
iconographies, and even in contemporary advertising imagery, considered as visual artist".
depositories, Arteni remakes an inventory of the level of subjacent structure, a formal Plotinus
plundering dominated by a rapacious capacity for transformation and synthesis. The game
of differences between emicly distinct artistic worlds is affirmed by interaction, rejection,
borrowing, variation due to inner chance, later selected in accordance to formal demands,
and outer chance encounters - in short, through a sort of Heideggerian destructive-
retrieval. Images and narrative motifs become ambiguous in the sphere of transcultural
contacts, and then form new constellations. In his works of 1977-1989, Arteni alternates
between stylistic poles: during these years he makes some of his purest abstractions, as
well as most of his figurative works. The horizons are multiple, and that multiplicity is itself
mutual constitution and interpenetration, different turnings within the same period:
variations on the theme of Renaissance-style Portraits, based on the formalized schemata
created by Hans Memling, Domenico Ghirlandaio, and Titian, Still Lives and
Compositional Landscapes, the Studio Series and the Abstract Compositions. The only
way to follow the creative act is to pass through all the variations of a series or sub-series,
the abrupt changes of idiom, surveying the artist’s interest in various styles and motifs
explored in the works, and his alternating concerns with diagrammatic simplification and
literal likeness.
The cognitive-normative difference dissolves earlier symbolizations. The ‘discourse’ of "Peirce's hypoicon, the concrete
traits, marks, brushstrokes, traces of the palette knife – Jean Marie Floch’s pictorial iconic sign, is self-referential as
formants - renders contingent the use of the figurative formant which associated to a such, and hetero-referential as
signified may become a sign. Arteni uses the distinction between the operative and figural related to symbolic and indexical
component. The signifiers of the artwork refer solely to signifieds within the work itself – properties".
the self-generated paradox of creating and disrupting illusion. The elements that serve as Winfried Noeth
the medial material substratum may, in the end, be more meaningful than a pure
semiotics has assumed. Arteni purges any content that is too narrative, relying instead on
the very power of gesture and form.

The ambiguous play between representation and abstraction characterizes the artist’s
variations on what is apparently a single theme – for example, the Warriors and Folktales
series. All series are synchronous. Arteni reinscribes the process within the framework of
the pictorial act and the pictorial fact. He favors petits formats that are always a challenge
in an era addicted to gigantism. His is a path which seeks means suitable to his needs
and an escape from contemporary formal conventions. The very way in which it is thought
leads outside language: it means to expropriate and appropriate metaphoric linkages out
of context – appropriation, according to Paul Ricoeur, is a recollection and an exercise in
suspicion, tension between incompatibility and a newly formulated artistic identity. “A non-
classical concept of identity becomes possible”, writes Eberhard von Goldammer, “and it
allows…the modeling of an identity distributed over several contextures…Every move
from a contexture to an other is bound with qualitative transformations which must remain
recognizable”.

To ‘appropriate’ what one is through the signs of a culture where ‘other’ are the authors of "The triadic sign relations have a
the sign implies that appropriation, what I make my own, is not something that lies behind fuzzy 'implicit' nature".
the sign, but, in Paul Ricoeur’s words, the world which it opens up, Gadamer’s Mihai Nadin
Horizontverschmelzung, the postulate of medieval arts where one selects or rejects on
the basis of the needs of the work, ad bonum operis. This is why Arteni never looses his
artistic self in the transition from one experiment to another and has the ability to react to
a wide variety of stimuli, intelligently assimilating them into a coherent oeuvre. There may
be a kind of counter-genealogy, a submerged, other history, a manner specific to form
that avoids the trap of the alter idem, discontinuous zones with no mediation other than
the [altered] self itself, or, to use Hawkes’ observation in a metaphorical sense: “…the
‘anaesthetic’ power of one’s language gives foreign speakers their accents”.
 He persists in this absurd world; he
stresses its perishability. He gropes his
way amid ruins.
Albert Camus

Arteni’s creative process begins with studies, collage-assemblages of color sample

cut-outs from periodicals, decontextualized iconic aggregates, photographs,
reproductions, drawings, prints, modified or not by means of various marks and
manipulations, i.e., a recursive networking of visual depositories. The process, used
for example by Peter Paul Rubens, defines the concept of art and probes its limits.
Chance plays an important role. Igor Yevin’s complexity theory of art speaks of the
stabilization of the unstable.

Mark Turner remarks that syntactic forms should be applicable to different situations.
Based on the preliminary studies, content free syntactic operations - the form of form,
non-representational representation, form-in-a-medium - lay the foundation of the
work or series of works, followed eventually by medially embodied iconizations. Arteni
chooses often to adopt the multi-phasic structure, a device from the art of the Middle
Ages, Vittore Carpaccio, and non-Western cultures.

Arteni’s creative path calls to mind Mark Turner’s and Gilles Fauconnier’s notion of
conceptual and visual blending: an integration network is created by using selective
borrowings, contradictory input spaces. A new sense emerges in the integrative blend
space subject to medium imposed constraints.

Myriam S.- P. de Arteni