THE WAY OF FORM - A RETROSPECTIVE

STEFAN ARTENI

Q C C ART GALLERY Queensborough Community College - The City University of New York
december 2005 - march 2006 A presentation designed by the artist

www.stefanarteni.net
The Polyphonic Monologue Addressing the Intersection of Art and Meditative Spirituality at the Heart of Form

Stefan Arteni [statement] When is art art at all? After the Century of the Avantgardes what can be more outrageous and unheard-of than a virtual space of re-Traditionalization? I propose a poly-contextural stylistic matrix, the transclassic operational interplay of a heterarchy of coexisting complementary artistic domains and formal systems, a simultaneous plurality of interwoven recursive and permutative differences. The stress on visual interfaces, discontinuity and metamorphoses, is underpinned by an evasive and implied topography of moveable roots and pasts. By the geographic accident of locating one's origins in a borderland, one becomes a dweller of the in-between and of the margins. This entails a foundational polyglotism across cultural and artistic habitats. The existential chronotope hinges on the emergence of fractality that encompasses networked systems where thresholds change the nature of relationships between formal repertoires. From the beginning, a translocal multi-identiy web and a recursiveness of identity recreation, a being between and astride cultures and moving across languages and visual contextures set side by side, imply a second-order perspective, an experiential metacultural sensibility - that is a shift toward looking at the gaze itself. An inner metalanguage, multiple inheritances and multiple codings, are at work. Second-order culture delineations are continuously reconstructed. The new entities produced by the peripatetic impulse open up a situational space which revels in the freedom of a horizonal in-between transcending untranslatable knots - a polyphonic monologue. West, East, Far East The form of the form

It is time to demand once again a maximum of complexity from the artwork. It is time to use again constraints in order to expand the room of art. Art can be reconnected with the chain of predecessors by reclaiming and renewing archaic memory, by restoring a larger and deeper constellation of sense beyond egolatry and egophany and beyond dominant ideologems. Zen emphasizes a transhistorical present in terms of an ever-renewable cyclicality, such as the play of condensed and interwoven mythologems, the return of recalcitrant myth, the cultural matrix concerned with archetypal fields and with damnation and redemption, the matrix which has survived displaced or camouflaged in contemporary secular culture or as a secular caricature, lurking in the subterranean memory and waiting to spring forth. Experience-oriented spirituality in Eastern and Far Eastern practices come together in layers of complexity and inspiration that resonate beyond the temporal realm. Continual endless juxtapositions explore ways to manipulate and restructure perception. The mark appears as a chronotopic palimpsest, the gesture as immediate enstatic experience. The new is there with the old, for with the first gesture all is already painted, even though all is still to be painted.

Well then, so call they, the swirlers out of the mist of my soul, They that come mewards, bearing old magic Ezra Pound

Welcome to the Way of Form. The purpose of this presentation is to draw the outline of a poly-contextural stylistic matrix, the transclassic operational interplay of a heterarchy of coexisting complementary artistic domains and formal systems - a metapainting which thematizes painting itself. It has its roots in East-Central European culture. This is an area of the world that had always been powerless and faced with CHOICELESS CHOICES, a world where man falls into a kind of new a-historicity as a paradoxical result of history. Metaphysical ruins, fragmentation and incohesion, and the existential emptiness are logical consequences and lasting scars. The dictate of reality becomes unbearable and the adequate answer to the unbearable reality is the reality of virtual irreality, form, the plural and protean, polymorphous and ludic, and yet unified, idiolectal painting which maps aggressively its own painterly act. Victor Turner opines that liminality is a fertile nothingness, a storehouse of possibilities. We narrate and continue narrating myths about ourselves, narrating ourselves as myth, writes R. Daskalov. The artist is cast in the role of a wanderer. It is a journey echoing the myth of Ulysses, a quest leading the artist to addressing the intersection of art and meditative spirituality at the heart of form. Beyond or behind signs there is a fundamental asemic reality that is simply there and with which one can make direct contact. The late writer Danilo Kis defines "form as possibility of choice, form that is an attempt to locate points of fulcrum in the chaos around us."

Mural projects. The art of mural decoration,frescoes and mosaics, and the shimmering of material kaleidoscopic color leaping out with the vibrancy of a polychrome relief, is pan-Mediterranean and pan-artistic. The preparatory cartoni for Orpheus, a projected sequence of six site-specific mural panels, have been executed in a mixed technique on eighteen sheets of paper using a limited palette. Only a few are exhibited here. The logic of ambiguity, of equivocality, of polarity, with the shiftings and tensions organizing its polysemy, is inherent in myth. This polysemy accounts for the signs taking on often simultaneously various values of meaning. Most of the images of an owl in ancient Greece simply represent Athena. In Neolithic Southeast Europe the Great Goddess as a symbol of death is represented as an owl. The owl is still known in the Balkans as a harbinger of death.

Myth. Given the remarkable interest in Greek myth shown by film makers, producers and directors, from Cine Citt to Hollywood, it should appear surprising that so few contemporary painters have explored the polyvalent implications of the theme of the descent to and ascent from a variety of underworlds, the nostos theme and its Odyssean substratum, blood sacrifices with cosmogonic connections, or, to put it in the words of Vytautas Kavolis, the demonic in the self, the tragic contingencies of a ritualized ethnocosmology which persists even where radical circumstances have uprooted entire social systems. Mircea Eliade argues that "the camouflageof spiritual meanings characterizes all crepuscular eras". Condensed and interwoven, mythologems lurk in the subterranean memory and wait to spring forth.

Oedipus of Thebes, whose name translates as 'swollen foot', is a legend possibly derived from a story that originated in ancient Egypt. Akhenaten, the controversial and enigmatic heretic king, is considered to be the historical model of legendary Oedipus. What makes Oedipus a hero, in the end, is that the sightless man finally 'sees'. "My will was never in my deedsI have overcome destiny, I have defeated the gods," declares Enescos Oedipus.

Orpheus, the Thracian singer who tamed wild beasts with his music, is an evanescent boundary figure located between history and legend. The numerous antique wall paintings, mosaic floors, and relief sculptures of Orpheus were, of course, only a symbolic allusion to his function as a savior who managed to enter the underworld and come out alive.

In all the Mediterranean world there are traces of a bull-cult, the sacred bull or auroch, the sacrificial bull whose blood is a giver of life. Europa, abducted by Zeus transformed into a sacred bull, became the first queen of Crete. She is the sister of dragonslaying Cadmus, who brought the Phoenician alphabet to Greece. At the deepest structural level, this myth parallels the flow of civilization and early technology (accompanied by the alphabet and resulting literacy) from east to west, crossing from the Near East and Asia to Europe. Amoretti and putti are a classical motif appropriated by Renaissance artists. These small winged babies usually accompany Cupid and are emblematic of the intents of Zeus.

Abduction of Europa.

Artemis (or Diana in Latin,) the Goddess of the moon and hunting, the Mistress of the Animals, the Mistress of the whole of wild nature, is a nurturer and destroyer. Actaeon was a hunter who stumbled on Diana bathing in the woods, only to be transformed into a stag devoured by his own dogs. Through the early modern period, a darker paraphrase of Actaeon appears in the works of Marlowe and Shakespeare, working on multiple levels simultaneously and connected to the cult of Queen Elizabeth as Diana. Other parallel treatments appear in art, including Bethsabe watched by king David, and the story of Suzanna and the Elders.

Diana and Actaeon.

The visual polyvalence of conventionalized and deracinated formal processes has only a compositional function. The interlacing of brush force and brush kinematics plays with the drift of form, the limit point when a gestalt organized visually and spatially by integration and segregation is no longer tenable as an idealized cognitive model.

Golden section. The ancient discovery. of harmonic proportion in music was translated to proportion in art. The early Renaissance architect Alberti credited the harmony of Roman architecture and the universe to this system. The Renaissance architect Palladio, along with Venetian musical theorists, developed a more complex system of harmonic proportion based on the major and minor third. Cognitive science and the bourgeoning field of neuroaesthetics seek today to explain the neurological basis of art and art perception - brainwaves appear related to the Golden Ratio, while the Fibonacci fractal sequence is connected to the Mandelbrot set. Visual design is based on modularity and multi-modularity systems, starting, on the one hand, from a 'visual grammar' , such as the Golden Mean or Golden Ratio and Alberti's harmonic proportion systems, or, on the other hand, converging to the proportion values known as the Golden Ratio. The organization matrices demonstrate the notions of self-similarity, metapatterning and ambiguous boundaries. Some artists used them as an instrument, the Parisian cubists for example. Henri Cartier-Bresson used the Golden Rectangle in photography, but, afterall, he was trained as a painter. The ancient sense of the word 'symmetry' is proportion. Dynamic symmetry, dissymmetry, fuzzy symmetry, may be used in combined forms. Perspective constructs also appear to be symmetry operations preserving certain features [Gyrgy Darvas]. Topological symmetry consists of transformation in which the neighborhood relations are intact.

Within the organization system the artist 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. As Leonid Tchertov puts it, the perceptographic code is a characteristic of form.

Metapictorial work is a modern condition of Art. Victor Stoichita Collage based series A few series of woks are based on preliminary collage studies and bozzetti. The selfreflexivity of the gaze is externalized with subtlety and resonance by means of practices which aim to recognize both semiotic flexibility and planned semiotic recycling, that is to say an open-ended interpretive appropriation and an ironic detournement of visual repertoires and tropes and their formal mutation, transposition and transubstantiation. The ongoing montage concentrates attention on the picture as a ludic surface and a recombinant form-space, as a contained multiplicity consisting of visual collages of reworked pieces of commodity culture, and, in analogy with music, citations, selfcitations, and formal variations. The symptoms of meta-artistic awareness and reflection form a net of intrinsically alternating and/or integrated references, extrapolations, derivations and transgressions. Style functions as content.

Emblem books of the sixteenth and seventieth centuries have revealed the contradictory symbolism of the terrestrial globe: the sphere as image of harmony and completeness of the universe, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the revolving spinning sphere suggestive of the ephemeral, unstable Creation, and the vanity of worldly things. The globe is a tool of learning and also an emblem of power. In Renaissance portraiture and 'impersonation' portraits, exact replication is not the goal. Often the portraits have a ritual or commemorative function.

Portraits Series.The geographer

Vanitas Series.The primary theme of a Vanitas type still-life is the delight of the senses: music to be heard, - string instruments especially are a symbol of harmony - wine and fruit to be tasted, and the feel of various fabrics. Interwoven with the first theme, the work is also a systematic documenting of the passing of such pleasures and the transience of life: dusk sets in, the wine glass is half empty, the bust of Augustus signifies the waning of glory and of Empires.

A Vanitas type composition showcases the highly conventionalized character of realism initially developed in Dutch Painting and the formal and medial constraints connected with a genre whose appeal has lasted until Juan Gris, Georges Braque and Andre Derain.

Warriors series. Epic memory's purpose is to block the work of forgetting. Art as site of memory, the visual fragment, the pithy frozen image as scene maker, assist in rediscovering the articulation of identity across discontinuity. As Pierre Nora puts it, "memory dictates and history writes". The Warriors series demonstrates the possibilities of a contemporary history painting.

Composition. The Polo Game. Known as the game of kings, the game of polo was probably first played by horse mounted nomadic warriors in Central Asia and Persia. Tamerlane's polo ground can still be seen in Samarkand. Based on initial studies created by means of photomontage and tearing away, the work encourages chance association of disparate elements and their subsequent transformation through transmedialization or, to put it differently, a nexus of supportive relations between formalization and play, and their chiastic reversal, the play of formalization.

Space is organized around a decisive blank that beckons the viewer's imagination in the construction of events. In the generalized, almost typological, rendering of the scene, the warriors are only suggested.

A Field Between Heaven and Earth The paradox of the series is that one has chosen a subject deeply embedded in history precisely in order to overcome image and the subject itself, giving a figurative style an oddly apocalyptic force by casting in the epicized mold the eschatological battle myth, the old myth of destruction and regeneration, and by mixing veracity and allegory - a pagan theme is the maiden dwelling in clouds which is the hero's assistant or otherwordly bride, and which may also be identified with Enyo [or horror], a Greek goddess of war.

As image of the Hero, the horseman was canonized in art. In Southeast Europe the hero horseman is a mythical figure and an eschatological symbol. Longlasting traditions such as folk ritual songs, carols, or the festival of Saint Theodore, center mainly on horses, the horse being a solar symbol. The Tartu-Moscow school of semiotics argues that a symbol mediates between different spheres of semiosis, it is a polylogue [that is a communication process involving multiple participants] which acts as a basic mechanism in cultural memory.

Myth. Deeper categories, stylistic ones, relate to man's existence within the horizon of mystery. By means of the magical-mythical, that is, the magic-ritualistic Ereignis that is gestural, artistic or musical, archaic humans succeeded not only in exerting a certain objective control over natural and human reality but also in building a subjective reality able to mentally replace the real one: the human culture. With an operatic grandeur, the lifelong experimentation with open series, cycles of related works, and meditative formal fantasia variations, which incorporate material freely and display an exceptional knowledge of diverse styles, creates a ceremonial, deliberate ballet of images and close-ups and is committed to unfolding into a vast painterly resonance. Complex signs are definitely pure painterliness enabling the recursive process of representation - signs become signs of signs.

Probing the aesthetic ideology of East-Central and SouthEastern Europe, Mircea Eliade describes a part pagan, part Christian matrix. It is said that after the building of Troy, Apollo, called 'born of a shewolf', returned on the Danube. It is in the Thracian Carpatho-Danubian area that the Other of Greece, Dionysos, the dying and reborn God, and Orpheus, the Night Master whose song could charm the beasts, are born. The myth making mechanism is organized as topological space. Boyan Manchev introduces the concept of the Other Greece, the dark Greece of mysteries, rituality and sacrifices, of divination, constant warfare and the hero cult, the Greece of vivid red and blue temples and of polychromatic painted and gilded statues, and of gods rolling dice for the possession of the Universe.It is the Greece of Bellerophon, a former rider of the winged horse Pegasus, on which he tried to fly to heaven after killing Chimaera, but fell and wandered about blind until his death, and of Perseus, the dragon slayer who later becomes the hero of Southeast European folktales.

Orpheus' Descent into Hades. Orpheus descends into Hades to have his bride, Eurydice, back. The hero's journey to the Underworld, the story of loss, separation and redemption, is part of a journey of initiation. Following Nietzsche, aesthetic thought is usually represented by Dionysos and Apollo, but, according to Viacheslav Ivanov, the third stage is personified by Orpheus. Czeslaw Milosz writes:"It is possible that there is no other memory than the memory of wounds." Czeslaw Milosz' Orpheus descends into Hades only to find, in the end, the desolate isolation he had sung to get rid of, now even emptier than before: For his defense he had a nine stringed lyre. He carried in it the music of the earth, against the abyss That buries all of sound in silence. It happened as he expected. He turned his head And behind him on the path was no one

The Meaning of Meaning The fool or jester indicates the world as a tragic place. The carnivalesque masquerade of the harlequin and of the satyr playing a tambourine, mixes the marvelous, the farcical, vulgarity, and seriousness, a reminder of the circus of life - 'circus' derives from circulus, a reference to the orbit of the planets, which is linked to the sphere of the gods. The extravagant juxtaposition, the grotesque mixing, the figures on the stage of a theatre of the absurd, the vestiges in modern time of art as festivalization, all of these reflect the Bakhtinian principle of 're-accentuation', the contemporaneousness of the non-contemporary, the simultaneity of the non-simultaneous.

The divine child Dionysos was raised by the nymphs of Mount Nysa,. He was tutored by Silenus, often shown as a drunken satyr. It should be noted that a remarkable pattern of correspondence does exist between Dionysus and Shiva, the latter known as lord of the dance and god of destruction and regeneration. In the contemporary enthusiasm for "creative destruction" we are once again in the domain of myth and of mythical thinking. Whoever wanders into the realm of Dionysian intoxication, risks being torn to pieces by his maenads.

The youth of Dionysos

The bacchanal series recalls the violence of the ancient rites of Dionysos - a pre-indo-european god of great antiquity, the god of annual renewal, a bull-god. Here mythology is lowered to the level of mortals and is also the pretext for an exercise in skill by accumulating figures and details in a forest glade. Festinalia, feasting dances after the repast, have been instituted by Dionysos and appear to be the origin of today's balls [late Latin ballare, greek ballizein, a large formal gathering for social dancing].

Perseus and Andromeda. The painting as aesthetic display is packed with references to other works - Roman murals, Byzantine mosaics, Titian, Rubens - and with complex interwoven forms transcending subject matter, it is a hieroglyphic or pictographic painting. Andromeda, meaning ruler of men, was said to be an Aethiopian, that is African, princess. Ancient Aethiopians considered Perseus and Andromeda the progenitors of the black race.

The transmission of tradition across cultural interfaces and their reconfiguration and reinterpretation within symbolic systems serves, on the one hand, as a conduit for Western artistic models, on the other hand, it indigenizes them across a range of cultural locations. Above is the Fury. The apple that Paris gave to Venus on Mount Ida may be viewed as the mythological original sin, as it was the beginning of the epic Trojan War, although Hercules had also sacked Troy a generation before Agamemnon and Ulysses. Ancient lore also tells that Zeus, like the Indian Gods, had the intention of easing the problem of overpopulation and thus facilitated the great war on the periphery. By embracing the characteristics of and delving into a mythical past, by juxtaposing old world formality and modern narcissism, one recasts the archetypal story of the Judgement of Paris and Troy in order to create an answer to the problems of the present. The epic of Troy tells that a culture can die. Archaeology shows that there were many wars in and about the city. The fortified town was located at the periphery of empires, that is to say between the Hittite Empire and the Aegean city states ruled by warlords, freebooters and pirates - the Odyssey commemorates their raids. While Greece may be paradoxically problematized as both the cradle and periphery of Europe, Troy itself may be construed as a metaphor of a borderland, of in-betweenness. Since at least the Trojan War, which was actually fought to dominate trade routes, the areas of South-Eastern Europe have been a strategic crossroads. Is the Southeast European chronotope predestined to cyclical destruction? A multifaceted referentiality highlights the similarities between the Trojan War, a tale from far gone times, and the European collision of empires in the Carpatho-Danubian and Balkan areas, emphasizing conflict as fundamental for the human condition. Maleable symbols act as attractors and allow the present to be fed back into the original equation. In so doing, one creates a visual duality between the past and the present and contrasts Baroque compositional techniques with the multiple non-discursive cinematic strategies of the twentieth century, that is spatial discontinuity with bizarre and distorted decor.

The Judgement of Paris

Moira's Tapestry. Moira, the sharer out, personification of fate and necessity, weaves the destiny of humankind, which is subject to her uncaring whimsy. Or as it were, she throws a meshwork over the universe. In Homer, she is older than the gods themselves.

Bible Review, June 2004: Arteni's Anastasis is reproduced on the cover.

It may be, of course, that the essence holds a dual paradox: the autonomous nature of this oriental iconolatry is fed on its very anachronism; or at a different level, it is also possible that with its strictly guarded rules, canonised icon painting, which originally negated individuality, has survived all attacks by alien ideals and...it suggests its own timely essence: collective autonomy. (Istvan Hajdu)

The Byzantine theory of images is paradigmatic, it rests on a culturally specific approach to understanding through sight. Ritual emblematic or pictographic compositions imply forms of cognition under conditions of an oral-visual culture. The artistic schematics always remain visible, introducing a dichotomy of schema and figure as well as a compression of form-space through perspective reversals. "Eyesight is hierarchically higher than hearing", writes Maria Roginska. "The metaphor of eyes as...windows in the body - and vice versa, the comparison of the windows to the eyes - refers toa 'chink' in a boundary. In an Orthodox world's model a window retains its archaic symbolism of a 'passage' into a different reality". Icons are contextually located objects using a codified visual 'language'. An icon's placement in a relational context is meant to use contrast, parallelism and symbolism, simultaneity and leit-motif, and montage techniques as described by the early Russian film theorists - although montage seems to be unique to cinema, it is in fact likely that the local Byzantine visual tradition shaped their cinematic practices. The Byzantines actually called themselves Romans, Romaioi in Greek. A largely illiterate public could include exalted persons, such as Emperors, besides masses of rural and townsfolk. Artistic integration in an Orthodox Church building transforms it into a multi-media ritual object, structuring the perceptual, sensory and conceptual experiences. The experiencing is many-sided, with olfactory, gustatory, and tactile contents, within an overall aural experience, while the vision is directed by the glitter and shimmering of lights reflected from mosaics and altarpieces and the stylized performance.

St. George's iconography encompasses apparently the mysterious earlier 'Thracian Horseman'. The Thracian, Danubian or Dacian Rider mystery cult guaranteed immortality. An ancient lead relief shows a pair of horsemen flanking a female deity whose attribute is a fish. St. George, the equestrian saint, is seen as the bringer of summer and fertility.

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)

The all-pervasive principle of mutability of forms remains a constant within pictorial inventions. Perspective and the organization of marks and signs are formulated in qualitative-geometrical terms [Barry Smith and Brandon Bennett]. The geometry is non-precise but only constrained by the qualitative topological data, it may be described as a mereogeometry dealing with qualitative spatial representation. The paintings deemphasize three-dimensionality The subject itself is indeterminate and confusing, apparently created purely as an artistic exercise, valuing erudition in all aspects of art. The play with perspectival games based on the Roman stage set, that is to say scaenographia conceived as perspective, the purposeful spatial complexity and a horror vacui (fear of vacuum) suggested by the tightly compressed figures underscored by a palette consisting of fragile hues, convey a sense of stylistic tension. Figural vignettes intersect surfaces where expressive abstraction challenges the viewer to focus where he/she ordinarily might not. The polyphony is organically embodied in the chromatic strategies working in the whole thickness of the layers. Palimpsestic superimpositions are intertwined with cesia, or visual sensations due to differences in paint application effects, and turn any possible form into the medium of a possible different form.

Bible Review, February 2005: Arteni's Conversion of Saul is reproduced on the Gallery page.

Within the Sectio Aurea surface organization, the contingent image structure is constructed as a formal play of interpretative stylistic citations: transpositions of Baroque drawings (putti and shepherd), Flemish Primitives (child and animals), and Medieval Miniatures (Magi). The color composition is based on a major orange-blue gamut, and the minors red-green (with a light-green dissonance in the Magi) and yellowviolet (with a lightyellow dissonance in the star).

Abstract. Representational variability shows that shifting back and forth between figural and abstract will allow for multiple stylistic variations.

Landscapes. Along a diachronic axis, the polyvalence of Western visual literacy is embodied in the structure of the compositional landscape and its topographical indeterminacy Cezanne's advice favors the active compositions of the masters. The second axis concerns a mode of organization proper to Persian painting. It depends upon qualities internal to the painting irrespective of its scale, a staging of landscape expounded by Andre Lhote, the binding of imagic constructs to the contrapuntal demands of the composition.

Legends. Figural emblems, ductility of brush and palette knife working on the geometry which structures matter, and a palimpsestic compilation and proliferation of traces reveal how fragmented cultural memory has embedded itself into the form via color as the medium of light. The double function of fine painting is always apparent: each form, each area of paint is both itself , a presemiotic unmediated materiality, and, at the same instant, the potential communication of illusion.

Hunting scenes derive in great part from mythological representations The hero-founder accompanied by his hound recalls the Thracian horseman. The hero, the auroch hunter of legend, the founder of Moldavia, has a cultural-mediator function as he personifies sacred kingship including its role of intermediary between gods and people. Hunting was perceived as a rite through which kingship asserts authority over the countryside and even mastery over nature and obtains a condition of liminality between the sacred and the profane - the latin sacer, translated as sacred, also signifies sacrifice. Sacrifice should be understood not only as ritual or exchange, but in all its foundational complexity - a reflexive activity which gives rise to creation itself.

Processual aesthetics recognizes the materially embodied dimensions of form as a sort of Heideggerian Verwindung [the lexical meaning is: twisting, twisted surmounting]. In art there is never a mere sequence, but in each case a polychronicity, a passing-by and simultaneity of the early and the late. Form is ceaselessly emptied. and thus offers the possibility of retrieval and transposition. Compositional constrained randomness and morpho-chromatic structure recall the formal repertoire of folk rugs, the painting being a visual remembrance of a pastoral folk ballad whose deep streak of fatalism describes death as a cosmic wedding.

MIOR ITA Translation: W. D. Snodgrass

Near a low foothill At Heaven's doorsill, Where the trail's descending To the plain and ending, Here three shepherds keep Their three flocks of sheep, One, Moldavian, One, Ungurean, And one, Vrancean. Now, the Vrancean And Ungurean In their thoughts, conniving, Have laid plans, contriving At the close of day To ambush and slay The Moldavian; He, the wealthier one, Had more flocks to keep, Handsome, long-horned sheep, Horses, trained and sound, And the fiercest hounds. One small ewe-lamb, though, Dappled gray as tow, While three full days passed Bleated loud and fast, Would not touch the grass. "Ewe-lamb, dapple-gray, Muzzled black and gray, While three full days passed You bleat loud and fast; Don't you like this grass? Are you too sick to eat, Little lamb so sweet?" "Oh my master dear, Drive the flock out near That field, dark to view, Where the grass grows new, Where there's shade for you. Master, master dear, Call a large hound near,

A fierce one and fearless, Strong, loyal and peerless. The Ungurean And the Vrancean When the daylight's through Mean to murder you." "Lamb, my little ewe, If this omen's true, If I'm doomed to death On this tract of heath, Tell the Vrancean And Ungurean To let my bones lie Somewhere here close by, By the sheepfold here So my flocks are near, Back of my hut's grounds So I'll hear my hounds. Tell them what I say: There, beside me lay One small pipe of beech With its soft, sweet speech, One small pipe of bone With its loving tone, One of elder wood, Fiery-tongued and good. Then the winds that blow Would play on them so All my listening sheep Would draw near and weep Tears, no blood so deep. How I met my death, Tell them not a breath; Say I could not tarry, I have gone to marry A princess - my bride Is the whole world's pride. At my wedding, tell How a bright star fell, Sun and moon came down To hold my bridal crown, Firs and maple trees Were my guests; my priests Were the mountains high;

Fiddlers, birds that fly, All birds of the sky; Torchlights, stars on high. But if you see there, Should you meet somewhere, My old mother, little, With her white wool girdle, Eyes with their tears flowing, Over the plains going, Asking one and all, Saying to them all, 'Who has ever known, Who has seen my own Shepherd fine to see, Slim as a willow tree, With his dear face, bright As the milk-foam, white, His small moustache, right As the young wheat's ear, With his hair so dear, Like plumes of the crow, Little eyes that glow Like the ripe, black sloe?' Ewe-lamb, small and pretty, For her sake have pity, Let it just be said I have gone to wed A princess most noble There on Heaven's doorsill. To that mother, old, Let it not be told That a star fell, bright, For my bridal night; Firs and maple trees Were my guests; my priests Were the mountains high; Fiddlers, birds that fly, All birds of the sky; Torchlights, stars on high."

Calligraphy oil. Signs are reduced to basic components of glyph structures and split glyphs, keeping in mind that glyphs for the same character may have different shapes. In the game of transmedialization the calligraphic sign is transferred to the medium of monotype or oil painting, where operational alterations may generate new surface structures, that is condensations and discontinuous assemblages of the underlying glyph topology, offsetting any one mode of appearing, in order to coordinate a plurality of appearances.

Folktales. The ancient Bird Goddess appears first in Paleolithic totemic carvings. By the beginning of agriculture in the Neolithic, Her worship achieves equivalent importance to the Great Earth Mother. Throughout classical antiquity She appeares linked to the worship of many important goddesses in the form of their sacred bird companion and alter-ego, e.g. Aphrodite's dove, Athena's owl, Saraswati's peacock. Her gift to the magical arts was a form of divination called Ornithomancy. Folktales suggest the persistence of the Goddess worship in the guises of Artemis, Hekate or the Virgin Mary. The stylized images of the sacred or magic Bird of folktales and that of the raven, the great black bird, the messenger of death who evokes the thought of battles, are woven in Romanian rugs. The mixed technique allegorical compositions underline the paradox of founding valid visual themes on local motifs.

Compartmentalized compositions Compartmentalization and sequencing recall the segmentation of Byzantine mosaic, Romanesque bas-relief compositions and Indian art, where visual constructs are placed in grid patterns and forms are combined to display multiple aspects of the visual data. Imagic constructs appear ambiguous. The baroque disposition of spaces, making use of friezes of interlocking figures in elaborate paratactic [side by side] compositions reminiscent of carved metopes and polychrome Gothic friezes, the linear quality and the stylization, recall pure stereometric forms.. The projecting low relief and various levels of modelled texture alternating with a sunken relief created by incisions suggest a sculptural painting revealing the cumulative effect of pentimenti.

Centaurs and Lapiths The Centauromachy refers to the tension between nature and culture, the archetypal struggle between human Lapiths and the halfhuman and half-horse Centaurs, barbaric forces intolerant of culture. Entities on the margins of humanness have always elicited cultural anxiety. The inner monumentality of the visual continuum derives from spiral frieze narratives on Roman monuments.

The Return of Ulysses Ulysses , the sacker of cities, the migrant and the wanderer, is the archetype of knowledge as survival. The Return - the Eternal Return- is the cosmic figure of identity, the ontological tautology of Being the Same, writes Boyan Manchev. The nostos [nostos, return, is also the root of the word nostalgia,] the harrowing return, speaks of the migrant's tale, of the exile's story. Every exile is a Ulysses traveling toward Ithacatoward the center, writes Mircea Eliade. The power to become a new Ulysses is given to any exile whatsoever (precisely because he has been condemned by the gods) The homeland becomes a lost Ithaca, and the modern-day Ulysses bears witness to the debasement and degradation of his homeland . There is also a kind of nostalgia for Troy's brave siege, a tension between what was and what may be. Ulysses still needs to achieve a mental/emotional nostos, he has to find the true path to the Self. It is the loop of nostos, the eternal return, the will to become what one is. If ever we need to heed the poets rendition of the monologue of Ulysses, it is now: At table's head I sit with myrrh anointed But long since am asleep under the walls of Troy Feasters do laugh and filled has been my cup You drink with the expired and hail the ghostly I have remained under the sloping walls of Troy. You speak to me of temples and pilasters Of the new gods that in my tracks have grown Let me then tell of my blue mates that perished Left far at Troy under the heaps of ashes.

By constructing series of variations around myth and folk narrative and by using symbol systems that can be traced back to antiquity, one is lead to the archaic mental paradigm of cyclic myths. Events are inherent to the cycle, and repeat themselves from time immemorial. Relations of equivalence are established between cosmos, the structure of the year and the parts of the human body. The painting transcends obvious readings to touch on more archetypal concerns, it deals with fundamental experiences, with the inner depths of the human soul, its mindless destructive violence and intense creativity.

Salome. Salome is said to have danced for the head of St. John the Baptist. Oscar Wilde's play and Richard Strauss' opera blur the boundaries between death and ambiguous eroticism.Is not Salome another version of a possible outcome of Wagner's Tristan and Isolde?

Moldavian Folktale The dragon slayer tale's basic structural scheme has been historically reconstructed in variants. The figure of the hero who killed a seven-headed serpent, the snake symbolizing false prophecies, is often transparently Near Eastern. The stories of Hercules, called the averter of ill, and of Perseus, the rider of the winged horse, belong to the 'mighty deeds' type of myth and revolve around themes of initiation and the culture-bearer.

Ariadne, Mistress of the Labyrinth It was Ariadne who helped Theseus to escape the Labyrinth. The center of the Cretan labyrinth palace is presumed to have been used for the sport of bull-leaping. The labyrinth may be the dance ground of Ariadne designed by Dedalus. The labyrinth is the inside that is wholly outside, it is a world of in-between, it is an initiatic matrifocal symbol to which a sacrificial dimension has been added. The pre-hellenic word labyrinthos is close to labyrus, the double-axe used in the ceremonial slaying of bulls. Ariadne's labyrus, or the ball of yarn thread in the myth, is needed to break a way out. The medieval Chartres Cathedral labyrinth was meant to be walked as a pilgrimage and/or for repentance. As a pilgrimage it was a questing, searching journey.

Vision is tactile without contactpractice is blinder in implication, more luminous in application. The origin of knowledge acquired through everyday practice is on the side of shadow In place of a planar triangulation of geometry there is now a stereometry of empty forms in the epiphany of diaphanousness. (Michel Serres)

Homage to Mario Sironi The story of the flight into Egypt is told laconically - it is a model whose significance reaches beyond differences, it is 'the flight', an intersection between the everyday and the never ending liminal cycle of the life of refugees. The abbreviated forms are defined by means of a thick, almost tactile, impasto, reminiscent of Mario Sironi's broadly sketched wall compositions.

Mural Projects

The playful assemblage, de-assemblage, and reassemblage of areas within which occur multiple intertwining formal visual pictorial narratives, iconography, and symbolism, often working at crosspurposes, help to lay bare the passage towards a resolution of conflicting objectives and the satisfaction of those contending parties presentation and representation. Form pictoriality and pictorial facticity - becomes the carrier of meaning.

Through time's howling clamor A voice of the nothing Through chattering aeon A wailing of humans (Lucian Blaga)

Within the context of Erving Goffman's dramaturgical metaphor, people barely mentioned in history will be defined as being removed from the stage - their senseless suffering, a suffering without redemption, is described by the obscure folktale riddle: "If you turn right, you will be in sorrow, if you turn left, you will be in sorrow as well". A civilization far from the state model, based on a network of cultural nodes, developed in South-East Europe about 7000 years ago. It had introduced the ritual use of markings and signs known as the lower Danube Valley protoscript, which appears as the oldest human ars scriptoria, whose elements are still present in the folk art rooted in the region's distant past. Marco Merlini describes a peculiar semiotic system based on a relationship between script, decoration and symbolism. In rural tradition, where the Horae of Greek mythology, personification of the seasons and of the natural order, and the choral performances in praise of Dionysos are still celebrated by sacred circular dances, such markings are elusive expressions associated with magic powers and epiphanies. The series stresses the topography of visual interfaces and explores ways to manipulate and restructure perception. Multiple inheritances are at work. The technology of art becomes a display of virtuosity. Work on the material medium provides a ductile visual texture saturating the surface and susceptible of all transformations and metamorphoses which are embodied by means of a technique proper to monochrome Japanese ink painting mixed with rubbing and monotype singular impressions.

Calligraphic (Zen) Icons Wen C Fong, the art historian, explains: "Knowledge of the past means action rather than an end in itself; it is intuitive and existential, rather than historical." Always unnaturalistic, painting as graphia, as a form of writing, consists of a 'given' form that is subtly changed by the subject who uses it, by the sweep of a single brushstroke where different parts of the picture are rhymed and unified by the artist's touch. From the artists biography : Rooted in Southeast European, Western and East Asian spirituality, Arteni's reframing of imagic constructs has been prompted by Niklas Luhmann's insight: "Symbols presuppose the difference between familiar and unfamiliar andenable the re-entry of this difference into the familiarThey are forms of self-reference using the self-reference of form". Arteni's polycontextural stylistic matrix allows room for a heterarchic play and recursive catenation of image structures where painterly time and painterly space - a topology of interlacings - may be envisioned as a polyphonic monologue. Michel Serres remarks: "An objectispolychronic, multitemporal, and reveals a time that is gathered together, with multiple pleats".

In an article written for the online journal Theandros , Thorsten Botz-Bornstein argues that there is a striking parallel between Byzantine and Japanese aesthetics. The muteoptical element has priority. Acts of formalization create a reality of their own, a reality that is strictly a formal one, a style mediated only through style, a reality which presents nothing but itself - style as a virtual world, or, paradoxically, as virtual irreality.

Calligraphy. Vibrant certainty its touch so fine, making a sign peak and abyss on the same line Henri Michaux
Forms of graphic notation allow for communication. The system elements are interrelated and subjected to a surface rhetoric. Oracle bone inscriptions mainly used for divination and bronze inscriptions on ritual vessels are among the earliest known forms of Chinese script. A web of sign practices appears as precursor to modern characters that have evolved from these archaic graphs. But above all, calligraphy is an unique art in whose medium-scape even written words can function iconically. Like calligraphers in earlier centuries, one draws inspiration from ancient calligraphy styles. As a result, several characters may be combined into one, or one character may appear as two. It is a confrontation between the calligrapher and the form. .In Zen terms, the form becomes the calligraphers koan. Handwriting is a long trained motor skill resulting in well co-articulated shapes like strokes and loops. Like most periodic motor behavior, graphic skills may be conceived of as the outcome of non-linear coupled oscillators model resulting from the nonlinear coupling between two orthogonal oscillatory components, identifying stable states (or attractors) in graphic skills. To sum up, both performance and degradation in handwriting find a unifying concept with the notion of stability, a hallmark in dynamical systems theories, a subtle interplay between stable patterns and the necessity to adopt less stable shapes and their co-articulation as attractors of underlying coordination dynamics that govern graphic performance. . Gesture, which belongs to the sphere of action, is to use Giorgio Agambens formulation the staging of a mediacy, the becoming-visible of the means as such. It makes manifest human existence as being always within a medium It makes the mediality of the process, of the gesture as Agamben defines it, the theme of its own action and demonstrationmovement which enacts and annotation that holds it in time.

A quote from the artists biography : Artenis interest in calligraphy began in high school. He studied with Chinese, Korean, and Japanese teachers, and is now pursuing calligraphy with Professor Yusho Tanaka (Setsuzan), Director of the Department of Calligraphy, Faculty of Literature, Daito Bunka University, Tokyo, one of Japan's foremost Living Masters and president of the Nihon Shodo Geijutsu Kyokai (The Japan Calligraphy Art Association) founded by Professor Kamijo Shinzan, a pupil of Miyajima Eishi and one of Japan's top calligraphers Arteni has been awarded in 2005 the highest rank, SHIHAN (Master Teacher), by The Japan Calligraphy Art Association. It is tradition that the teacher gives the student an art name which points to the student's nature. In 2005 Arteni received the special art name GEIZAN [meaning Art Mountain] from Yusho (Setsuzan) Tanaka Sensei. Arteni was given a part of the Teacher's art name, ZAN [meaning Mountain,] as a symbol of spiritual succession.

Setsuzan Sensei and Arteni next to Artenis 2005 prize-winning calligraphy

Setsuzan Sensei and Arteni (the hanging scroll is a calligraphy by Setsuzan Sensei)

Artist's Books (Sol Invictus Press)

In a time when books are produced and marketed like industrial products and scorned as the fossil remains of a bygone form of communication medium one realizes that as a work of the imagination, as poiesis and techne, a book can be whatever one can dream it to be. The Greek term poiesis signifies creation or production, while praxis means action or doing. Excellence in poiesis is achieved by skill, art, craft, techne.

As the leaves of a Sol Invictus book are turned and the characters/symbols/images succeed each other in space and time, each seemingly the work of an inspired moment which has flowed spontaneously from the artist's hand, the awareness grows that an important message is being spoken to the eye and inscribed in the mind. (Isaac Gewirtz, Curator, Henry W. And Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library)

Cantique de Saint Jean. The powerful treatment is derived from Japanese calligraphy and Byzantine models using the medium to omit spatial illusion which would 'break up' the surface of the leaf. The ink monotypes explore metamorphic variations of Byzantine visual themes such as the severed head on a plate and of the Baptism.

Laudes Creaturarumis a stunning whole comprised of carefully considered details. Each folio is a paper handmade from fiber of a different plant that grows in ColombiaPage composition is based on the golden section. Printed on each is part of the well-known Canticle of Brother Sun by Saint Francis of Assisiin its oldest known version. Each section of type, in black, is decorated with handcarved initials in red. Also red are the carved seals, their references and cross-references reflecting many cultures, from Egyptian to Chinese and Romanian. The dramatic drawings are more personal but as multicultural. Like oriental pictures of the mind, in black ink on the natural paper, they refer to the words of Saint Francis as well, but through archetypal symbols (Jacqueline Brody, Editor, The Print Collectors Newsletter, Vol.XXIV No. 1 March-April 1993)

Laudes Creaturarum. The very symbols used in different writing systems result from a compromise between the needs of the hand and those of the eye and resist any easy distinction between image and writing. The visual diptych of the open codex enables the eye to immediately grasp the repertoire of complex glyphs fully integrated as emblematic patterns, whether Egyptian hieroglyph, or American Indian pictograph, or Chinese character, or typographic pattern. The large initials blur the boundaries between picture and calligraphy. Writing and images intersect and emphasize visual links over comprehension, the main concern being to make picture and script appear as a decorative unity - we may even speak of asemic writing, a play with the text configuration as shape and object.

Coda Hidai Tenrai coined the term hitsu i, the spirit of the brush. It is a dynamic notion dependent on the stroke. Abstract variations on an ostinato progression, give us an insistent, dance-like movement. The line is a calligraphic three dimensional line.

The Thinker as Poet

Wandering

River Bank

Encountering Sorrow Whether relief or intaglio, carved seals are a vessel for a spiritual, dramatic art. The knife used for seal cutting is called iron brush. Particular attention is paid to the enhanced aesthetic effect of seal script in the organic design of the pages.

Apocalypse. Stylized unreal scenes are placed in constantly changing position on the page using intentionally stylistic elements that are archaic in appearance and signify a fascinating crucible of the most diverse influences. A sense of magic and expectation is meant to seize the visitor when he/she peruses the clay monotypes.

The books room features also a few preparatory cartoni for the Orpheus mural. Orpheus was usually depicted as a young harp player wearing a Phrygian conical peaked cap, seated on a rock, and surrounded by animals that were charmed by his music. An austere, obliquely classicizing form repertoire pursuing unexpected visual rhythms, numerous transposed self-quotations and quotations - Orpheus and Pan surreptitiously adapt an early Byzantine type while the snake is a formal variation based on the configuration of a cursive Chinese glyph - and the iterative use of a densely textured compartmentalized assemblage, strive to reinvent a stripped down archaic visual matrix. The pure visuality of the integrated system may be identified with associatively structured memory - it is about form and about associative links allowing the choice of parallel and/or overlapping and intersecting formal repertoires. Materiality, that is interest in the unfinished and open tangible facticity of substance, and spirituality, that is the non-verbal magical-mythical infinite play, are twin aspects of the way of form, which is to be understood as process in the making: one responds to the way only by travelling the way.

Assembled Orpheus Cartoni

From the artists biography :

The immediacy of ink splashes spattered on paper creates a constructed void Zao Wou-Ki

International Art Projects

2004-2005 UNstant (An-instant), a collective work packaged in book form, initiated and made possible by I.D.E.A.C. (Institut d'Esthetique des Arts Contemporains/Universite Paris I Pantheon-Sorbonne) and C.N.R.S.(Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique), France, is about exploring transversal thought and emerging gesture in the visual, audio, and movement mediums. Arteni's intervention (ink works, artist's books and monotypes portfolio) showcases a polycontextural artistic matrix, the mark as chronotopic palimpsest, the total gesture as immediate enstatic experience. An excellent opportunity for presenting UNstant was offered by a conference at the University of Reading, U.K., September 2005, on the theme "Transversalities, crossing disciplines, cultures and identities".

form as possibility of choice, form that is an attempt to locate points of fulcrumin the chaos around us (Danilo Ki)

Beautyis freedom's essenceit is a state of beingit stays in reserve, unobtrusive, meek, a sort of silent movie. (Nicolae Steinhardt)