Stefan Arteni

Traditioning: the Game of Painting

an autobiographical visual essay

Stefan Arteni, Selfportrait

SOLINVICTUS PRESS 2010

 Home is where one starts from.
(T.S.Eliot)

The Gods threw the dice of Dasein. And I was born in 1947 in
Bucharest, once known as Little Paris. The East-Central
European cultural space appears as the liminal locus (which can
also become detached from regional reference) where
semiospheres come into contact, intersect and overlap This
entails a foundational polyglotism across cultural and artistic
habitats which also means becoming fluent in the languages of
the currently predominant cultures. The antebellic educational
system pursued and encouraged such an aim.
"Multilingualism…highlights the inherent instability of meaning,"
writes Antony Adolf. Speaking about artists, Caryl Emerson
argues that “exile, displacement, multi-
languagedness…outsideness to oneself and thus a taste for
irony… “ constitute the defining coordinates of a unique heritage,
a polycentered identity connected to “finding themselves always
between several cultures and unable to lose themselves in any
one of them…” or, so to speak, "planted in each reality,
informed by all, circumscribed by none". The increased
metacultural and meta-artistic skills trigger a heightened
awareness of cognitve styles and of syntactic factors. Beyond or
behind signs there is a fundamental asemic reality that is simply
‘there’ and with which one can make direct contact. It is a quest
echoing the myth of Ulysses, a quest leading the artist to
addressing the intersection of art and meditative spirituality at the
heart of form.
 Symbols …presuppose the difference between familiar and unfamiliar and…enable
the re-entry of this difference into the familiar…They are forms of self-reference
using the self-reference of form.
(Niklas Luhmann)

An artist's split between cultures becomes a potential means of deautomatizing

worn-out formal devices, a strategy of inserting and asserting, of uprooting and
defamiliarizing formal contextures. In a true sense the process exhibits a
polycontextural stylistic matrix and a distributed artistic identity – one runs across
the terms heterarchy, contexture, polycontexturality, transjunction and
kenogrammatics in Gotthard Guenther’s transclassic logic investigations.
Polycontextural systems apply different codes of self-observation related to different
observation positions. Calling to mind 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 I call
kenosyntax, the mechanism of all relational and operational orders. Relative to the
empty place the actual content inserted is entirely contingent. The mark appears as
a chronotopic palimpsest, the gesture as immediate enstatic experience.
With Luhmann, the form patterns of ritual repetition (the Latin repetere means to
seek again) and stabilization are entwined with compression of form and reduction of
meaning. But more important, and in the end more powerful, is the idea of
heterarchy, the play of parallel and simultaneously active and/or interwoven multiple
artistic contextures while respecting the logic of each, and producing ambivalence
and paradox when they intersect. One may say that visual art is “a system of
systems…using concurrently different options…”, a dynamic polychrony. The sign
becomes apophatic in nature, it always refers to another sign. Within the
compositional organization system one uses a recursive dynamic stochastic
operational algorithm for generating medium constrained structures which must be
interpreted in the context of perceptographic domain knowledge to produce a
symbolic representation.
 …another choice of tradition…
(Milan Kundera)

It may be argued that in any given instantiation stylistic codes undergo a

procedural qualitative change and restructuring, and the process may be
valued as autocommunication in Yuri Lotman’s sense, the I – I channel,
a channel essential to synthesizing and crunching information, to
appropriating and recoding opaque or empty sign systems. The process
generates a formal idiolect. Yuri Levin asserts that autocommunication is
inherent to art making and it is also projected into the act of reception.
Some salient features include increased indexicalization and
abbreviations. Niklas Luhmann tells us that “the function of style is to
organize the contribution of the work of art to the autopoiesis of art, and
in fact in a certain sense against the intention of the work of art, which
aims for self-containment”.

The investigation of form calls attention to the question of cultural transfer

and to the notions of boundary, center, and periphery of visual
semiospheres, and to their mnemonic devices. Peter Bogh Andersen
argues that “most symbolic processes do in fact exhibit a fractal self-
similar structure”, while Terry Marks-Tarlow suggests that fractal
boundaries “form endless, infinitely complex zones of articulation and
negotiation”. The boundary is a zone of semiotic polyglotism. Yuri
Lotman asserts that the semiosphere is “a conglomerate of boundaries
defining everchanging internal and external spaces”.

The virtual play of formal domains involves operational behaviour to

achieve coherent structures. It involves emergence, replication,
regeneration, transformation, expressed in terms of interactional
processes that result from the formal application of and procedural
switches between simultaneously existing artistic domains. A switch can
in itself be of complex structure entailing a multitude of chiastic ways and
their changes.
Gheorghe Petrascu

Gheorghe Petrascu
Gheorghe Petrascu

Gheorghe Petrascu
 Stefan Dimitrescu

Stefan Dimitrescu, recto and verso

Lucian Grigorescu

Lucian Grigorescu
Dumitru Ghiata

Dumitru Ghiata
Dumitru Ghiata
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Theodor Pallady

Theodor Pallady
Theodor Pallady
Camil Ressu
Camil Ressu
Henri Catargi

Henri Catargi
Stefan Arteni
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 Exile is a hard walk, an intricate tattoo.
(Daniel Simko)

An ‘artistic utterance’ consists of the use of a material medium

which supports the symbolically generalized communication
medium art. I explore the underlying constraints whose material
and procedural potentials have been dismissed by interpretational
conventions. Studio practices and techniques involve overlapping,
scale, parallel projections, multi-viewpoint
perspective, stacked perspective. It is worth noting Rubens’ way
of manipulating sketches by cropping, cutting, resizing, and
pasting on a backing sheet. Complementary procedures of
integration and coordination of registers, compartmentalization,
pictorial riddles, combine with areas of structural indeterminacy
(e.g. the so-called passages, where ephemeral boundaries are
drawn by perception). The concept of indeterminacy has been
introduced by Roman Ingarden and further articulated by Stefania
Skwarczynska and Roberto Poli. For Ingarden, it constitutes the
main criterion with which to distinguish the intentional creation.
Vagueness pertains ontologically to the fiat world of painting.

A paint layer may be scratched through or trailed. Paint layers

structure involves transparency, opacity and translucency, and
texture of the layers. This search, the play of manual and
technological skills, and the language of form, are inherent to my
paintings.
Niccolo di Siena, Pinacoteca Nazionale, Siena
Antonio Veneziano, Picture Gallery, The Vatican
Copy after Robert Campin, Musee des Beaux-Arts, Tournai
Stefan Arteni
 Dormition of the Virgin church, Baia, 16th century
merlinlx.wordpress.com/2010/04/06/biserica-lui-petru-rares-din...

Dormition of the Virgin church, Baia, 16th century

merlinlx.wordpress.com/2010/04/06/biserica-lui-petru-rares-din...
Stefan Arteni
Anonymous German Master, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford
Jean Baptiste Camille Corot, Louvre Museum, Paris

Ion Andreescu
Andre Derain

Andre Derain
Stefan Arteni

Stefan Arteni
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Paolo Veronese, Prado Museum, Madrid
Stefan Arteni
 I
n
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N
o
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G
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1
8
2
5

Tiziano Vecellio, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

Stefan Arteni
Nicolas Poussin, ,Alte Pinakothek, Munich
Stefan Arteni
 Jacopo Tintoretto, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

Raoul Dufy, Musée d'Art Moderne - Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris

Stefan Arteni

Stefan Arteni
Tiziano Vecellio, Prado Museum, Madrid
Peter Paul Rubens, Prado Museum, Madrid
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Peter Paul Rubens, Venusfeast and detail, Kunsthistorisches
Museum, Vienna
Stefan Arteni
 Andre Derain

Nicolae Tonitza
Stefan Arteni
 Jean Antoine Watteau, Condé Museum, Chantilly

Jean Antoine Watteau, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Stefan Arteni

Stefan Arteni
Willem Claesz. Heda, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
Pieter Claesz, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
Jan van de Velde II, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
Andre Derain

Andre Derain
Andre Derain

Andre Derain
Stefan Arteni
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Jan Vermeer, Mauritshuis, The Hague
Stefan Arteni
Jan Vermeer, Royal Collection, London
www.essentialvermeer.com
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 Genres ensure both repetition and difference. Peter Bogh
Andersen suggests that genres help reduce system complexity -
genres are defined as patterns that transcend individual works.
From Dutch still-life to Andre Derain, the language of
emblematics, the Vanitas still-life type, and the variety
of ‘meals’, respect a restricted color harmony and a tight stylistic
consistency. Moving between transformations and extensions of
the portrait genre, landscapes, and still-lives as allegories of
transitoriness, I develop an array of improvisations. A restricted
formal code reveals the stochastic and the lawful.
Visual rhythm and rhyme intertwine and untangle themselves in
the act of painting.