An Exhibition of Monotypes by STEFAN ARTENI

ANABASIS
St Marks Library, The General Theological Seminary, New York (November, 1999)

2012

The artist is both founder and exile, always lost to himself, outside, belonging to separation (Blanchot). Art appears as the highest form of play (Tillich), play as an overall category of the imagination, of which seeing is the central ingredient. Painting is a performative (parfournir: to carry out thoroughly) re-membering (as opposed to dis-membering), a self-abandonment (Schelling), whereby one is given up to the moment.

A country here, not mine. What has the world given me but this swaying of grass? St.- John Perse

The channel forms as the water flows. Zen proverb

the drums of exile waken on the marches Eternity yawning on the sands. "I have told no one to wait I hate you all, gently, And what is to be said of this song you elicit from us?" St.- John Perse

But what is useless can still be a force and perhaps the only one. Martin Heidegger

Ploughland of dream! Who talks of building? - I have seen the earth parcelled out in vast spaces and my thought is not heedless of the navigator. St.- John Perse

Does man touch the mystery of finitude only still in art, which has not shed its cultic(Gadamer) and ludic (Huizinga) rootedness? Art is in the artist. The opus is made per artem. Paint continuously alters the operation: materialis efficetur. Painting is a manifold topology/place-ing of markings, coming forth, gathering up in accordance to an asignifying syntax (Staal), attuned to the open/no-thingness which is as real as the marks themselves. Doing-being-becoming are cut off from a why and wherefore outside of themselves and become autotelic (Nishitani), what Buddhism calls playful samadhi (settling) and what Taoism calls wu-wei (action as manifestation without limitations): letting-be as such/letting go.