Stefan Arteni

Traditioning: the Game of Painting

an autobiographical visual essay

Stefan Arteni, Selfportrait

SOLINVICTUS PRESS 2010

In order to illustrate some features of the use of the history of art,
the virtual structures and their discontinuities, all one needs is to
investigate the role of color. While the visual content is laid down
in a variety of invariant-based configurations, an extended color
gamut explores color system complexity.

One can see the complementary like a halo after one stares for a
while at a color applied on a white background. My color gamuts
are based on a constraint model which depends on near
complements. Color contrast functions as oscillation. The
dominants and subdominants act as attractors. The model may
be combined with dissociation of color from outline. To implement
this model, a number of works use color gamut compensation,
color shift, and reduced colors, for preserving the same,
constant value or brightness level. Other works explore closely
related color scales, retaining sonorities unique to each.
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Collages constitute a visual meditation on the matrix of particular
representation systems and practices. They emphasize stylistic
convention and devices, and open up the possibility of stylistic
interpretative citation and paraphrase. This is borne out when,
instead of abiding by Western-centeredness, one changes the
standpoint from which one observes the art work. I am evidently
concerned with the polycontextural appropriating of ‘empty’ sign
systems and with their unified but heterogeneous and
heterochronic coexistence, their simultaneous connecting and
separating.
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 Central to the mode of looking that painting prompts since the
Early Modern Era is a preoccupation with self-reference, the
metapainting paradigm, where strands of meta-artistic reflection
endeavor to investigate and expose the gesture of handicraft as a
radical reassertion of agency and restoration of integrity, as a
time of unmediated "true memory" and "skills passed down by
unspoken traditions, in the body’s inherent self-knowledge, in
unstudied reflexes… social, collective and all-encompassing", as
Pierre Nora puts it. We are always simultaneously making
gestures that are archaic, modern, in the here and in
futurity…every historical era is likewise multitemporal,
simultaneously drawing from the obsolete, the contemporary, and
the future. Or, to quote Michel Serres, “an object, a
circumstance, is thus polychronic, multitemporal, and reveals a
time that is gathered together, with multiple pleats”.
Already durational, when made public or considered as
performative, handicraft becomes politically charged, an active
resistance to contemporary spectacle, mass-production and
uniformity.
In light of this, medium awareness determines how one
addresses that which is most immediately relevant to a viewer
standing in front of one of the works: the legacy of painting itself,
how painting corresponds or becomes invisible to the eye, how
art history consists of a succession of conflicts between
techniques of perception. Both the physical malleability of paint
and the concurrent fluidity of signification are central to this
undertaking whose chief motif is the palimpsest and the related
geography of visual art.
I shall conclude my presentation with a few works created before
1971, works which have been almost certainly destroyed.
However that may be , the photographs may
elucidate the meaning of nostos (homecoming), a pilgrimage, a
circular journey to new and more comprehensive insight into
one’s rootedness. T.S.Elliot has written:

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
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Exile, ostracism, homecoming. But the journey and the destination
are a single continuum, Ithaca's gift is contained in the journey
itself. Is Ithaca a real place? Or is it only a dream? C.P.Cavafy has
written (translation by George Barbanis):

“When you start on your journey to Ithaca,

then pray that the road is long,
full of adventure, full of knowledge…
Always keep Ithaca in your mind.
To arrive there is your ultimate goal.
But do not hurry the voyage at all.
It is better to let it last for many years;
and to anchor at the island when you are old,
rich with all you have gained on the way,
not expecting that Ithaca will offer you riches.
Ithaca has given you the beautiful voyage.
Without her you would have never set out on the road.
She has nothing more to give you.
And if you find her poor, Ithaca has not deceived you.
Wise as you have become, with so much experience,
you must already have understood what Ithacas mean.”