Myriam S. P.

de Arteni

The Horizon of Stefan Artenis Calligraphic Art

SolInvictus Press 2006

What was it, what is it, what will it be we filled the world with our cry and calling. The dawn is back, the red moon set, do we know now?

Czeslaw Milosz

Our definition of BIC [Behavioural Implicit Communication] is: A practical action primarily aimed to reach a practical goal which can also lead to achieve a communicative goal, without any predetermined (conventional or innate) specialized meaning. .. BIC plays an irreplaceable and underestimated role in human interaction and coordination, social order, cultural transmission We restrict stigmergy to a special form of BIC where the addressee does not perceive the behavior (during its performance) but perceives other post-hoc traces and outcomes of it.

Cristiano Castelfranchi

Stefan Arteni, from the Heart Sutra Series

The essence of art is the self-programming of the artwork. Niklas Luhmann Stefan Artenis Chinese name is AI Tayi, and his pen-name is KUANG XIAN (in Chinese) or KYOSEN (in Japanese). A noted Master calligrapher and seal carver, Arteni is grounded in more than one language and culture. Inspired by the other Moderns, Zao Wou-ki and especially Julius Bissier, a friend of Martin Heidegger since their schooldays, Arteni became interested in the art of calligraphy at an early date. Artenis works are often exhibited in the United States as well as in Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. In 1996 and 2005, his works were awarded the Grand Prize of the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Interaction beyond any particular culture allows for an art which expands itself, or, to put it in the language of the artist himself, artistic paradigms are connected operationally. Experience, graphia, which means both writing and painting, is revalidated. The medium disciplines our perception. According to a well-known calligrapher, the exhibition Calligraphy and Art, organized by the Taiwan Museum of Art at the Taichung County Seaport Art Center between December 9, 2000 and January 14, 2001, inscribes Artenis work simultaneously within the contemporary interpretive Chinese and Japanese calligraphic art and within the formal path of a dialogue between East Asia and the West opened by the post-World War II cole de Paris and Gruppe Zen.

Stefan Arteni

To give oneself a rhythm, to take a rhythm upon oneself, to successfully bring one into existence, this is the first condition for producing beautiful things Silvio Ceccato . The Chinese have decided in favour of visual script, writes Gotthard Guenther. Engelbert Kronthaler emphasizes that while the East lets the foreign be absorbed and rest within itself, and thus, globally seen, lets both foreign and autochthonous elements stay polycontexturally side by side, the West grows through the monocontextural metamorphosis of the foreign into the autochthonous. Speaking of semiotics in Japanese culture, Yoshihiko Ikegami makes mention of the instantiation of a semiotic structure with an empty center. The empty center stands ready to lend itself toall kinds of possible reorganizations. Steve Odin defines Chan (Zen) as a boundless openness devoid of all metaphysical centers", similar to the Hesychasts kenosis, the soteriological concept of Nothingness as Emptiness or Sunyata, Nishitani Keijis self-emptying, the locus of Nothingness where one can say yes to all things. Operationally this suggests multiple coexisting formal systems mediated by a recursive, permutative, polylocal, decentered organization. Arteni proposes the polycontextural interplay of a heterarchy of complementary artistic domains, a simultaneous plurality of equally valid and interwoven differences, an exploration of arts multivariate encodings, transitions from one domain into the other, the transcontextural binding, mediating, blending in of contextures. Stefan Arteni

Stefan Arteni, from the Heart Sutra Series

Stefan Arteni, from the Heart Sutra Series

Stefan Arteni, from the Heart Sutra Series

Stefan Arteni, from the Heart Sutra Series

Stefan Arteni, from the Heart Sutra Series

Stefan Arteni, from the Heart Sutra Series

Stefan Arteni, from the Heart Sutra Series

Stefan Arteni, from the Heart Sutra Series

To experience is to go along a way. Martin Heidegger Arteni investigates the formalism of self-limiting constructs: the linear changes developed in calligraphy, such as center brush and hidden tip, side brush and square brush, round and angular brushwork, techniques such as rubbing and monotype processes. Chinese and Japanese calligraphy use script as the medium of art. It is questionable whether legibility, the communicative function of writing, boosts calligraphys visual art function. In fact, calligraphic art is slowly relinquishing its utilitarian side. Form opens up the possibility of transgression. For Arteni, the matter of interest is the image of writing and the materiality of script, form as form-in-a-medium, that is to say not an analogon, but a spatially and temporally situated operation, a contingent concretization, or, as Niklas Luhmann puts it, the arbitrary generation of nonarbitrariness. Arteni constantly employs strict compositional logic which is perfectly balanced and finds its own enrichment within itself. The mere fact of a transcultural play becomes reworking and creative transformation. Praxis as a type of syntactic creativity, transforms the passivity of the material medium into a functional process, declares Arteni. On the other hand, the fundamental pattern of the morphogram (the Chinese character) or of the phonogram (Hiragana and Katakana), the structural constancy, is so valid, so gripping in every case, that it still presents itself as the most useful material for any search. Formal transfiguration is made possible only by contrast with a configuration that is enduring. "The future of art depends on whether it can make use of constraints to expand the room for further distinctions". Niklas Luhmann

Stefan Arteni, Calligraphy

The sign is carried by a material medium. In the game of transmedialization, the material media being relatively close to each other, Arteni transfers the calligraphic sign to the medium of monotype or oil painting, keeping in mind the necessity of preserving the underlying structure, although operational alterations may generate new surface structures. As Arteni puts it, art is meant to interrupt automatic reactions, to open up a space of play. The new is there with the old, for with the first strokes, all is already painted, even though all is still to be painted. For Arteni, play harnesses the ability to offset any one mode of appearing, in order to coordinate a plurality of appearances. This is why Arteni endorses the polymorphic spinning of scenarios that chisel out the topography of reciprocal transpositions between his paintings, his Chan (Zen)-like calligraphic Icons interpretations, and his calligraphy and seal cutting, the fusion of invention and traditions.

"Art is a game, one which may prove sublime, but which is still a game". Andr Derain

Stefan Arteni

Stefan Arteni

Stefan Arteni

Stefan Arteni, oil on canvas

Stefan Arteni, oil on canvas

Stefan Arteni, oil on canvas

Stefan Arteni, oil on canvas

Stefan Arteni, oil on canvas

Like painting, scribal writing requires both competency and form. Niklas Luhmann The vitality of Artenis art originates in his accessing the prereflective roots of disclosedness, or, to appropriate Steve Odins cogent formulation, the empty reality of immediate experience. There is no other way, Arteni seems to say, but to introduce emptiness as the necessary space for a transclassical approach, as the frame for the operational exploration of possible formal contextures. And as he does so, many unexpected cross-fertilizations and grafts emerge. The variations on a given pattern, rhythm, and the dynamism of the strokes, underscored by Svend Ostergaard, are vital to Artenis calligraphic work. The traditional glossaries of calligraphic strokes are transmuted into visual and gestural vectors. Conceiving script primarily as form, as manipulation of meaningless graphic marks located in and bound to a pictorial space, Arteni pursues the emancipation of script from language through scripto-graphic transformations and transposed configurations, through a kind of permutography, underscoring the element of recovery and retrieval of the pictorial-imagic, of the painted marks gestalt quality. Black functions as color; black and white may subsume all chromatic categories. Artenis blacks have many precedents in Moldavian (Bessarabian) folk art and in the works of Frans Hals, Juan Gris, Pierre Soulages, and Zao Wou-ki. By calling into question the aesthetics of reception and its limitations, Arteni establishes the site wherein are situated the acts of making in which the artist participates by doing, acts belonging to a dimension that precedes all conceptualization and encompassing the horizon of aisthesis, that is to say temporal activity, bodily movement, tactility, sight, and making as self-making.

Stefan Arteni

Arteni invents new means to answer new purposes: he employs round and square brushes, bamboo pens, palette knives. Then he goes off on yet another tangent: he pours, scratches and gouges the surface, scrabbles, scrapes, scrawls and scrags, in a sort of controlled frenzy. The artists vision knits together details that emerge and coalesce from the fragments enmeshed in the nebulous and blurred background, fragments, now and then quivering with color, that seem as if striving to dissolve and reform. A distinct configuration takes shape. Dieter Mersch defines the paradox of the performative making as the impossibility of representing the moment of the representations instantiation. Artenis calligraphy, a rhapsody of improvisations, gives birth to the singularity of the event itself, it temporalizes the picture by means of the trace of the gesture.

"Each stroke of a character contains all things in the universe". Kukai

Myriam S. P. de Arteni

traveling east or west light and free on the one road I dont know whether Im on the way or at home

Muso Soseki