Exhibit Description



This Retrospective Exhibition unveils over thirty years of stylistically and thematically organized artistic creation. It is an intent to search Arteni's artistic itinerary in an international context and to identify the foundations on which his meditative work rests and the principles to which it has remained true.This publication contains an essay by the artist in which he reframes the concept of art from a systems point of view.

Drawing upon a huge wellspring of mythic-historical symbols, Arteni attempts to confront living the present in historical terms through the process of art. His work is both personal and universal, because of foreign origins which provide a unique view on the function of art, its continual transition and fictional construction of liminality, and the synchronicity of archetypes.

Resolutely single-voiced distance from all orthodoxies inhabits an impressive aloneness. Arteni acts as an archaeologist unearthing images and fragments, a disjunctive narrative, dream-like recollections displayed through an intricate extension of traditional craft. Re-visiting and re-interpreting artistic geography become an event of the work itself. It is worth pointing out the trans-cultural experience, the coming to terms with a multiple cultural heritage, and the interweaving of cultural webs in terms of unity and diversity, enriched by a sensitivity rooted in the deconstructive retrieval of fragmented inheritances.

This Retrospective Exhibition shows works which have never before or rarely been on display. They reveal not only Arteni's distinctive history, always shadowed by darkness and loss, but also the kaleidoscope of cultural memory confronting a fragmented and untenable present and the artist's connection to the co-play of visual semiospheres and their numberless strata, a sort of polyphonic heteroglossia exemplifying a paradoxical contemporaneity of the non-contemporaneous. In Arteni, one gets the sense of a mercurial sensibility intent not only on the mastery of all techniques but also of all art history.