A Selection of Calligraphic Icons

by Stefan Arteni

SolInvictus Press 2008

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 Arteni’s 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
and…enable the re-entry of this difference into the familiar…They 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 object…is…polychronic, multitemporal, and reveals a
time that is gathered together, with multiple pleats".