Paintings, Collages and Monotypes by

STEFAN ARTENI

Orpheus:
Variations on a Theme

2010
 A painter is to himself his own virtuoso.
Etienne Gilson

Walls, whose worn markings and irregular surfaces seem to contain what one mentally redesigns (Leonardo da
Vinci), enjoy a mythic matrix of meanings. Boundary of an other world and also division between chaos and
cosmos, guardians for and against someone, they separate light and shadow, being and non-being.

The work arises as that which withdraws (Heidegger), the

work projected on a virtual wall, the wall to be
built (Duthuit), the wall with/of paintings: modulations
of the surface whose rhythm commands the composition,
the ordering of a jointing (harmonia); monumentality – the
monument is that which endures in the form, as a
formula that transmits itself towards self-alienation,
that endures exposed to time and successions of
interpretations and as the residual trace of an event –
on the model of myth, its constitution and reconstitution;
Levi-Strauss’ similarity between mythopoiesis
and bricolage (Vattimo).

Once again let it be your morning, gods.

With you the world arises, and your dawn

gleams on each crack and crevice of our failure.
Rainer Maria Rilke
 Admire the remarkable power
And the nobility of line:
It is the voice made audible by the light
Of which Hermes Trismegistus speaks in his Pimander.

Guillaume Apollinaire,
The Bestiary or The Procession of Orpheus