Calligraphies by STEFAN ARTENI

Ink 1989 - 1999

(the collection of images is different from that shown on www.stefanarteni.net)

2012

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

ars- skill as result of knowledge and practice/ its display or application/ artifice/ learning artifex- master/ skilled practitioner The artist concentrates upon the process. Emptiness opens up: an absolute negativity. One learns to let go: creative and deliberately artificial play (Schillers play-instinct as the origin of visual art); play as freedom (Huizinga); correspondences, marks, and their ritual manipulation; the act as gift (Baudrillard). The unpainted space, virtuality, has the same value as the painted one: to see together and treat as a whole brushmarks and intervals (Duthuit) activating the entire surface welling up from within. The game is a symbolic repetitive enactment closed in itself (Nicholas of Cusa). It is a possible world (Arbib, Hesse). What matters is one locating oneself therein ritual renunciation of self (Bataille), Mallarmes pure play, the divine game where the whole of chance is affirmed in one throw (Deleuze).

The artist, like the God of creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails. James Joyce