STEFAN ARTENI

STEFAN ARTENI

On Painting: Phenomenology
On Painting: Phenomenology and and Praxis

SolInvictus Press
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NOTE:

The illustrations in this essay reproduce

a few of Stefan Arteni’s self-portraits

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 The channel forms as the water flows.

Zen Proverb

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.

But what is useless can still be a force and

perhaps the only one.

Martin Heidegger

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 …the painting, a concrete metaphor of a
general idea of matter…

Jean Pierre Jouffroy

techne - knowledge/ know-how/ a revealing, bringing-forth of whatever

can look and turn out now one way and now another

Painting is dependent upon the specific phenomena of vision: marks are made to be
seen and are dependent upon the inner dynamic of the tool and medium
(Sausmarez). It is one thing to see a painting as a painting, beyond the thrill of
recognition and literary associations, and another to see it as some particular
painting of something (Wittgenstein).

The painter thinks in paint (Merleau-Ponty). Matter imposes restrictions

(Putnam). Primitive craftsmen were surrounded by awe: lords of the hands.
Artists today suffer of the complex of being a mere vilis mechanicus,
reproducing the division of labour into mental and manual components,
with primacy of place reserved for the former (Lincoln). Painting is a
knowledge in the hands (Merleau-Ponty): Velasquez’s dita pensose.

All this pertains to I do not know what

alphabet of which only a part is
perceived.

Nicolas de Stael

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 Invited or not, the God will be present.

The Oracle at Delphi

lila - the play of divine energy that mediates between emptiness and the world
of name and shape

samadhi - related linguistically to the Greek synthesis

Matter transforms itself condensing into dynamic structures, primary and

secondary accords, dynamic continuity, actualising potentialities. Interval is
matter.

Though one may attain a beginning before the beginning, nothing is

attained: a supralogical realization of the paradox expressed in the timeless
attitude of potential ‘void’, destitute of meaning, a silent growth,
transmutation, and destruction, limiting qualifications of works as roadmarks
on a path that is intrinsically illusory, the showing/pointing to as
to ‘make appear’ / ‘to let shine forth’ (Heidegger).

In India painting is something colorful (citra), it is a shining forth (abhasa), a sign that
may not become transparent in the act of reference (Vattimo), never
used up by interpretation.

We know only that the masks of Dionysos

should make the god present in his
epiphany… the mask is entirely encounter, only
encounter, pure face-to-face,…
the most immediate presence, absolute absence.

W.F.Otto

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 Dionysos, the formless-forming,
constructing-destroying god whose
regard is the mask, whose epiphany
is his hiddenness, who is one and many,
exuberant life and the simple serenity
of Hades…

Eugen Fink

Paint resists and yields, the fluid/viscous vehicle becomes the dominant
substance - a work of binding, duration being engraved in the paste -
a de-formation of the formless to create form (Bachelard), a ritualized doing
which controls the mind: a painting is an articulated relational system, a two-
dimensional field constructed of integrally related areas, each influenced by its
environment and by the operating inter-relationships, essentially vectorial (e.g.
El Greco’s form felt from within) and kinetic (rhythm), following systems of
rules selected by cultural constraints (Chomsky), a map with its mysterious
conventions, apparently a random collection of colors that the initiate perceives
as forces at work that in turn transform him. Being grows out of doing, the
repeated doing gives shape to the artist’s Being (Zimmer).

There is no immobile color.

Paul Claudel

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 The mathematics of picture-making lead
me to the physics of representation.

Juan Gris

Paint is a medium that is worked by attentiveness to the way paint as paint will
allow itself to be manipulated in order to obtain from one’s instrument the
modulations that fit it.

The painting is thus defined as an internal multiplicity – relations and

singularities within the play of reciprocal determinations – where intensive
variations (e.g. degrees of whiteness) appear as individuating modalities. The
parts of a painting sustain a twofold type of relation among themselves
- a relation of each to the other parts, and of each to the whole (Pareyson).

Painting is a set/network of alterable, many-layered conventions (Schlick),

subject to internal consistency: a pictorial formula, everytime a total, constructed
according to its own syntactic matrices.

To see is in principle to see more than what one

sees, it is access to a latent being. The invisible
is the prominence and depth of the visible…

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

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 A painting is a thing which requires as much
cunning, rascality and viciousness as the
perpetration of a crime.

Edgar Degas

The techniques may be seen as stratagems; grasp of a method – rules that can
be learned only as instruments for carrying out operative functions – does not
carry with it the ability to visualize the product. The development is not
determined, although it is constrained (Bachelard). The formal demands of
. pictorial space have to be carried out according to laws which hold in virtue of
form, not content (Arnheim). Point, line, extension, plane, are defined
implicitely via interrelations.

Only now are you going your way to

greatness! Peak and abyss - they
are now joined together.

Friedrich Nietzsche

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 For it hates the thoughtful God
Growth out of time.

Friedrich Holderlin

The artist relates to form for its own sake. What matters is form-grounding. Form
sets up providing the guiding measure through harmony (armos:
joining/organicity) by means of the dynamic symmetry (Pythagoras) of
proportions. The work made according to art (poiesis) requires choice and
filtering, selection and joining (Ricoeur). Technique – the means and ways of
operation – is determined but has to be discovered. It is closely related to the
individuality of the work and strictly adapted to the painter (Maritain).

Art, if it can be compared to a window

at all, is only a sketched window.

Victor Shklovsky

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