Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Livres de Peintre
One-of-a-Kind Books
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Our primary activity is the making of artist's books since 1991. Our
books are made by hand and are published in limited editions. We also
nurture the development of one-of-a-kind books. Sol Invictus Press
pursues a little known aspect of Chinese art, the unique book of seal
impressions (yinpu). Stefan Arteni is the first Western artist who has
mastered the art of seal cutting, favored by the Chinese literati as a
cultivated pursuit. Sol Invictus Press books have been acquired by art
collectors, bibliophiles, and public collections around the world.
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“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.”
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Laudes Creaturarum
1992
Poem by St Francis of Assissi. Fifteen original sumi ink drawings interspersed within
text and on wrapper. Text handset in Goudy Old Italian and printed letterpress on
handmade Papel Zepia. Handcarved initials and signature seals hand impressed with
Chinese red seal paste. Original drawings, initials and signature seals by Stefan Arteni.
Designed and printed by Myriam S.P. de Arteni. English translation by Barbara Carle.
Sixteen folios 37.3 x 57.5 centimeters (15 x 23 inches). Edition of twenty-six. Colophon
numbered and signed by the designer and artist
Everything that remains to our world of the man knows to us as St. Francis of Assisi is
addressed to our most intimate nature. His words illuminate such fundamental concerns
as the nature of existence, life, death, the self, and what is beyond the self. As a focus
for meditation, Laudes Creaturarum, known also as The Canticle of Brother Sun,
conveys through archetypal symbols the ultimate visualization of the serenity and joy of
the world.
The imagery of the sumi drawings must be approached in terms of the endless
juxtaposition, contrast and harmony of signs and symbols: an Egyptian hieroglyphic, the
American Indian sign for abundance, an imperfect circle as the expression of the
inexpressible. Things are not what they seem, nor are they otherwise.
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A Small Book Of Engraved Mountain
Stone Seals
1993
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Encountering Sorrow
1993
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A Large Book Of Recently Engraved
Stone Seals
1993
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The Large Emerging from the Small
1994
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A Book Of Collected Seal Script
Carvings
1994
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The Thinker as Poet
1994
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Casual Writings By A Window
1995
The basis for this meditation on art and life is the way of the
pilgrim drifting from place to place, searching for a way to
apprehend truth directly. The text uses mainly five and
seven characters for each line.
“Casual Writings by a Window is a poem which Arteni composed by combining inscriptions from ancient Chinese paintings
and poems. These he either carved in stone and printed, or wrote with a bamboo stick. For the seals, Arteni has adopted an
ancient style of Chinese writing invented at least as early as 600 B.C. and whose various forms had become standardized
by 200 B.C. Now, it is
used only for seals and is called ‘seal-script.’ Here, Arteni plays with the traditional seal-script forms, sometimes intentionally
distorting them to the point of illegibility, thereby transforming them into designs of almost pure form. For the text, he has
used a semi-cursive style of Chinese character. However, instead of employing a brush, the traditional means of forming
these characters, he has used a bamboo stick.
Arteni's calligraphic style incorporates elements from Japanese and Chinese traditions, as well as his own interpretations of
them. The mingling of the two styles, he feels, is natural, since in earlier centuries, the characters of both languages were
essentially identical, though a Chinese and a Japanese would pronounce them differently. “ (Isaac Gewirtz)
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Ai Tai I's Carvings
1995
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Wandering
1995
This album of sumi monotypes, based on variations on the characters for pilgrim
(unsui: clouds and water), is inspired by Muso Soseki's poem about the wandering
seeker. They are assemblages of pictures having an improvisation character,
heightening the awareness of emptiness by compositional cohesiveness and
varying textures.
Wandering
a runaway son
will never come
into his own
my treasure
is the cloud on the peak
the moon over the
valley
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Cantique de Saint Jean
1996
In a dark and deprived time the poet utters the holy: a language
that responds to and recalls the unspoken. Images are bidden to
come to this place of meeting. Rhythm, that what forms the
movement of dance and song and poem, fittingly reemerges in
the essential schemata of Byzantine painting tradition.
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Democratie
1996
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Fool of a Cat
1997
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Coda
1997
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River Bank
1997
River Bank
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The Return of Ulysses
2007
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Scrieri
2008
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Collages I
Undated
Collages II
Undated
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Apocalypse
1996
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Apocalypse
1996
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Vices And Virtues
1992
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Ink
Undated
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No-thing-ness
Undated
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The Prayer of Jesus I
1992
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The Prayer of Jesus II
1992
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Works in Progress
What speaks is, in its solitude,
in its fragile vibration, in its nothingness,
the word itself - not the meaning of the word,
but its enigmatic and precarious being.
Stephane Mallarme
The glory of the book as a work of art lies in the future, once the electronic media and the computer have taken from it the baser
burdens it must still bear. Literature is a kind of self-contained verbal ceremony (Mallarme).
The festive state as a game is a rite - a rite de passage - to be participated in only by initiates, participating sacrificially: com-
memoration (Coomaraswamy).
Tang Dynasty poet, painter, and musician Wang Wei produces through
his poetic technique an artifact whose contemplation can itself be an
ecstatic Zen experience. Sudden knowledge, however, leads to grief,
measured by movement from one time of pain into another.
Contextualization occurs through allusion to Buddhist, Taoist or poetic
texts.
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Mythology / From the Fragments (Daniel Simko)
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Mama Owl and Her Owlets,
Spotty and Fuzzy
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Light
(a fragment from Milton's
Paradise Lost, Book 3)
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