Stefan Arteni

Traditioning: the Game of Painting

an autobiographical visual essay

II

Stefan Arteni, Selfportrait

SOLINVICTUS PRESS 2010

 The past is not dead, it's not even past.
(William Faulkner)

After the Century of the Avantgardes what can be more

outrageous and unheard-of than a space of re-Traditionalization?
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. There may be an alternative,
non-canonized history of twentieth century art, a history of
periphery input and dispersed diasporas, a history of the
omnipresence of present pasts playfully renegotiated by every
new work that is itself informed by what precedes it.

One may also underscore the ambivalence of the center and

periphery concepts and of the hierarchic differentiation
center/periphery. In 1971, when I chose the way of exile, the
Western art world was already under the domination of a
revolutionary marxist avant-garde. Czeslaw Milosz once
remarked: “It tells the story of how a center, by losing faith in
itself, changes through resignation into a periphery”. Rome, the
eternal city, and Paris, the capital of culture, had become
ideological peripheries of Moscow. The great interbellic painting
had been put to the index – one could not see anywhere a later
Derain or a monumental Sironi. Modernity had been constrained
by an outlook for which art has no history. Fortunately, there was
the Museum Europe which, as Norbert Bolz writes,
“ liberates us from the specific modern obligation of being always
absolutely modern. It quotes the Modern ironically and thinks it
anew - as something past".
 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 meta-artistic sensibility. Rooted in Southeast European, Western and
East Asian spirituality, my stylistic matrix allows room for a play and recursive
catenation of structures where painterly time and painterly space - a topology of
interlacings - may be envisioned as a polyphonic monologue. A cultural space set at
the crossroads of semiospheres is the meeting point of incongruent traditions
mediated by procedural transjunction – the Eastern-Orthodox Byzantine (painting
as prayer of the heart), the West European, the East Asian (the way of the brush
as meditation that dismisses thought and concepts). The process bears a similarity
to the spirit of the medieval practice of musical contrafacta: the artist combines
sources, models, and methods with improvisation and quasirandomness. By means
of the metaphor of polycontexturality one enters artistic 'multi-languageness' -
cultural polyglotism - a plural and dynamic heterarchy of contextures and their playful
synchronicity, diachronicity and polychronicity. Relativizing semiotics, the process
introduces the concept of keno-sign [empty sign].

"Forms are created from the concatenation of operations upon themselves

and…are…rather indications of processes…The closed loop of perception occurs in
the eternity of present individual time," writes Louis H. Kauffman. Thus one may
speak of circular operationality, of the recursive self-implication of form, and
also of indirect recursion when two or more procedures cyclically call each
other. Form implies itself as a meta-distinction, as a form of form. Ranulph
Glanville describes art as an “iterative and circular process with the unknowable” and
concludes: “Art is deeply cybernetic”.
This path calls to mind Mark Turner’s and Gilles Fauconnier’s notion of conceptual
and visual blending: The game of differences between emicly distinct artistic worlds
is affirmed by interaction, rejection, borrowing, variation due to inner chance, later
selected in accordance to formal demands, and outer chance encounters - in short,
through a sort of Heideggerian destructive-retrieval which follows the postulate of
medieval arts where one selects or rejects on the basis of the needs of the work, ad
bonum operis. 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.
Correggio, Louvre Museum, Paris
Stefan Arteni
 Jacob Jordaens, Grenoble Museum, Grenoble

Anthony Van Dyck, Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, Cologne

Antoine Watteau, Louvre Museum, Paris
Stefan Arteni
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Etruscan hydria, 6th century BC, Louvre Museum, Paris
 Tiziano Vecellio

Peter Paul Rubens after Tiziano

Stefan Arteni
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Roman mosaic, El Jem museum, Tunisia
Dosso Dossi, National Gallery, London
Nicolas Poussin, Musee Conde, Chantilly

Luca Giordano, Fesch Palace, Ajaccio

 Eugene Delacroix, Louvre Museum, Paris

Andre Derain after Nicolas Poussin, Musée National d'Art Moderne -

Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris
Felice Carena
Stefan Arteni
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Andre Derain
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Annibale Carraci, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence

Andre Derain
Stefan Arteni
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Fortune, Roman mosaic, Archaeological Museum, Carthage

Ceres, Roman mosaic, Roman moisaic,

Bardo Museum, Tunis Bardo Museum, Tunis
Stefan Arteni
 Tiziano Vecellio, National Gallery, Washington

Tiziano Vecellio, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Peter Paul Rubens, Prado Museum, Madrid
Andre Derain, Musée d´ Art Moderne, Troyes

Andre Derain
Stefan Arteni
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Stefan Arteni
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 Jacopo Tintoretto, Galleria Dell' Accademia, Venice,
diagram by Jan Hamsik

Jan Vermeer, Mauritshuis, The Hague, diagram by Jan Hamsik

Jean Metzinger, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Jacques Villon, Metz Cathedral
Jacques Villon, Metz Cathedral
Jacques Villon, Musée National d'Art Moderne –
Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris
 Jacques Villon, Musee d’Art, Metz

Jacques Villon, Kemper Art Museum, St Louis

Stefan Arteni
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Pan Painter, Attic red-figure krater, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Tiziano Vecellio, Death of Actaeon and detail,
National Gallery, London
Stefan Arteni
Stefan Arteni
Serge Poliakoff

Serge Poliakoff
Serge Poliakoff
Nicolas de Stael

Nicolas de Stael
Stefan Arteni
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Gino Severini, Leopold Museum, Vienna
Stefan Arteni
Ambrogio di Predis, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Andrea del Brescianino, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford
Francesco Ubertini (Bacchiacca), Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Francisc Sirato
Jacques Villon, Musée National d'Art Moderne - Centre
Georges Pompidou, Paris

Jacques Villon, Haggerty Museum, Milwaukee

Andre Lhote, Musée National d'Art Moderne –
Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris
Andre Lhote

Andre Lhote
Stefan Arteni
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