STEFAN ARTENI

(calligraphy names: 艾太宜, 狂仙 , 藝山 )

talks about
THE GAME OF PAINTING
Stefan Arteni’s exhibited Composition
The game is the cipher of the world and the
paradigm of creativity.

Stefan Arteni, Composition

It may be interesting to note that in my native
language, Romanian, the word used for game
also means ritual folk dance. To paraphrase a
Chinese artist: the sound of the brush and the
movement of paint sing and dance together.

Stefan Arteni, Mioritic Triptych

 Stefan Arteni, Composition
Art is an infinite game, an intricate kaleidoscope
of games being played. Art is
poiesis-autopoiesis, and all its participants
are poietai - makers.
Forms are created from the concatenation of operations
upon themselves. (Louis H. Kauffman) "The world
of action intuition — the world of poiesis — is none other
than the world of pure experience." (Nishida Kitaro) …a
circular…process. (Ranulph Glanville) The rituals of the
game make time repeat cyclically – we are an insignificant
element of the Eternal Return (i.e. the conception of cycles
that are similar, not identical cf. Mircea Eliade). ”The end
is in the beginning, and yet you go on.” (Samuel Becket)

Recognizing the deep significance of the Uroboros to

processes of self-generation, Varela chose an icon of the
snake swallowing its own tail as a symbol for reentry in his
calculus of self-reference. It depicts what Varela describes
as the “ceaseless circular process which is, in fact, the
symbol which tradition has chosen to represent the
creation of everything since time immemorial” (Varela,
1975, p.23).

The mark appears as a chronotopic palimpsest, the

gesture as immediate enstatic experience - painting
involves tactile and kinetic memory.
We are always simultaneously making gestures that are
archaic, modern, in the here and in futurity. One can also
speak here of an aesthetics of visual fragments where
cultural memory crystallizes itself, a kind of chain reaction
exploring the multifaceted relationship between
remembering, forgetting, and the pathways of alterity.
Creativity is suspended between memory and forgetting.
(Jorge Luis Borges)
We are our memory, we are that chimerical museum of
shifting shapes, that pile of broken mirrors. (Jorge
Luis Borges) Niklas Luhmann thought memory should
be compared with a labyrinth.
Stefan Arteni, Time, Myth, Memory,
a set of four horizontal scrolls
Let me render homage to Tanaka Setsuzan, my
calligraphy teacher. Setsuzan Sensei once said:
The Gods speak through the marks drawn by the
artist’s brush.

Stefan Arteni’s calligraphy brushes

My interest in calligraphy began in high school. Upon first
viewing a 1962 B&W motion picture entitled Harakiri
(Seppuku), I was profoundly impressed by the perfect
composition of each image. Many scenes suggest a
wonderful calligraphic dance. In terms of its content, the
motion picture draws attention to the performative qualities
of ritual.

Harakiri (Seppuku), a 1962 motion picture

http://www.blu-ray.com/movies/Harakiri-Blu-ray/26531/
Calligraphy is one of the spiritual, martial and aesthetic
disciplines or ways.
Thorsten Botz-Bornstein argues that there is a striking
parallel between Byzantine and Japanese aesthetics. The
mute-optical 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.

I wish to say that I have gradually rediscovered the

Byzantine tradition, it has affirmed itself as my deeper
personality. Paradoxically, perhaps, it is to Japan I owe
this return to my deepest origins.

Stefan Arteni, Studies of Icons

Stefan Arteni, Studies of Icons

Stefan Arteni, Studies of Icons

…it remains just play: the highest and the most
profound play. But this ‘just’ is everything, the one,
the only. (Martin Heidegger)

Stefan Arteni, Although The Moon Sets, It Does Not Leave

Heaven
Stefan Arteni, Every Day Is A Good Day