Rinos Stefani’s series of Praxeis and installations titled SOLDIERS – TARGETS and HUMAN TARGETS as well as his paintings on the theme of cross-shaped syrtaki DANCERS are the progenitors of his latest RE – AL creations, which turn the green military canvas into a literal battle field, perforated with holes inflicted by a red-hot metal, substitute to a machine gun. The traumatic shots penetrate the material substance of the work itself and the physical and esoteric substance of the white crucified figure, delineated with a bold, gestural expressionism. Hovering between a harsh political and economic reality on the one hand and a utopia on the other, between dignity and humiliation, life and death, the haloed figure, flanked by crosses made of cloth stitches and surrounded by pain and agony schematically cast on the heads of an anonymous populace below, passes from the earthly to the celestial: “And about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, Eli, Eli, lama savachthani? “

Dr. Nadia Anaxagorou, Exhibition “RECTO – VERSO: From Byzantium to Modernism”, Evagoras Lanitis Centre, Limassol, 20 March – 8 May 2015.

The creative process of Rinos Stefani, far from any academic education and his academic standards, is based on a spontaneous variation of motifs, which spring freely from one painting to the other, as interconnected series, taking eventually a form which is «imposed», one that has not been consciously selected, and one that is transformed and enriched semantically. That is why the artist gives titles to his works after he has finished painting and these have a very loose connection to the actual content. For example, the title of his painting According to the Low of the People‘s Republic of China, which he executed based on the memories of a trip to Beijing, is not directly related to a particular real experience or with the painting itself.

This is also the case with the painting Messenger of Alcala street. The artist establishes a game, at times a sarcastic one, but always charming, between that which is depicted in his work and the title, shifting the viewer’s thought to other conceptual areas, as surrealists did with poetry. The more the title moves away from the actual content of his work, the more likely it is for the poetic miracle to occur.

Rinos Stefani likes the new realities that come about from the connection of two totally different fields. It is the same mechanism that connects, consciously or subconsciously, experiences and memories from those trips that influence him. In the former of the two paintings mentioned above, faces, objects, letters and signs coexist in an unrelated way. What connects them is the single painting surface, which serves a semantic role without, however, defining a specific place.

The key element that dominates in the image is the mingled figures in blatantly exploding erotic positions, which seem to be over the moon at the peak of erotic frenzy. It is “an invariably direct, ‘natural’ sexuality, primitive […] eroticism.” Indeed, in his erotic works, there is an unrestrained sexual sensuality, together with a savagery that accompanies it outside social conventionalities. The artist’s attraction to primitive peoples is not accidental, just as it was not accidental for Antonin Artaud, who, with the Theatre of Cruelty, wanted to give the power of primitive savagery to the human body.

The love couples of Rinos, as if they are “unchanged images of a primordial ritual” walk on a tightrope and float – both an image and a symbol of the boldness of the artist, who plays with fire. Images boxed in multiple combinations form a continuous process of deconstruction and construction until the final theme of his work is established. At the bottom of the painting we see three figures, three walkers with disproportionate bodies who move around wearing gas masks.

These masks, which can also be seen in the artist’s other two paintings, a symbol of protection from an imminent threat, semantically define, according to Stefani, our age since these naked bodies are timeless and are ideally connected with the primitive. Metaphysical concerns, real fears for existing dangers and social criticism are some of the issues that are crystallized in these masks, a motif that recurs in many paintings of the latest series executed by the artist. Together with the human figures, there are words as a direct reference to graffiti, as visual signs which exert a special appeal, irrespective of their semantic content. This is also the case with the timeless symbol of the Cross, which transcends any allusion to religion and often recurs in order to balance the composition; this element applies also to the arrow in his work Messenger of Alcala street.

Another enigmatic element in these in these two paintings is the motif of the parallel abstract lines: they look like prison bars or steps leading nowhere; yet they are just three trunks; timber piles that impressed the artist when he saw them on a trip to the Amazon Basin; images, which he associates with the memories of the wood piles he saw as a child in his village. Very often than not, in Rinos Stefani’s work there is a merge of elements that characterise different places and time periods, transcending a specific reality. The condensation of allusions, elements and motifs annuls the first obvious perception one has of his works, emphasizing the polysemy of artistic reality. In Amacayacu, the same faceless people, always wearing gas masks, move around in an unreal world, holding these odd objects under their arms – we are not sure whether they are huge phalluses, which form a cross, an aeroplane, a weapon or even amputated torsos of imaginary beings. Tree trunks, which in other paintings are depicted in piles, acquire here an erotic, threatening and violent content, in which there is even a reference to environmental problems. Like a modern trapeze artist, Rinos Stefani each time takes the risk of falling from the tightrope and it is this real risk that gives to his paintings not just the character of representation but the actual “Praxeis” * itself.

*Basically, there is no difference between the various happenings, which the artist calls PRAXEIS, since there is continuity throughout his creative process that each time is expressed in a different way, using a different medium.

Dr Andri Michael, Art Historian, Faculty of Art [UPJV], Amiens, France, Exhibition “The Body: Stories and Representations”, Evagoras Lanitis Centre, Limassol. 16 June – 31 July 2010

Journeys and travel have always inspired artists. Art also changes the way we view and perceive places. Journeys are really about having a certain mindset which considers the destination to be just as important as what one absorbs on the way. And one must not forget that journeying new places implies merging the unknown and its challenges. This is what has occurred with Rinos Stefani’s art, which has been inspired and infused by different continents and specific places he has journeyed to.

In London, where he studied, he unwrapped the intricacies of galleries, museums, the Old Masters, as well as modernist and contemporary art. While there, he also discovered the multicultural society, observing its depths and its shallowness, and absorbing how other people lived – their music, history, food. From London, he traveled to other European cities. Every new experience opened up a new surface and depth, accepting and valuing diversity, subtle differences and the unknown.

In Berlin, he was surprised by encountering the music of the Andes by the Latinos. This later took him to the other side of the Atlantic, to South America: from cosmopolitan Bogotá to Medellin, from San Agustin in the Andes to Cartagena and Santa Marta in the Caribbean. From there, he journeyed south to the Amazon River, where Colombia meets Peru and Brazil, catching piranhas while watching trunks float down the river. An adventure and a challenge by the nameless.

Spain and France also left an imprint – Catalonia and its Romanesque art, the Pyrenees, the Basque countryside, the Paleolithic paintings in the caves of Isturitz and Oxocelaya in Baja Navarra between Lascaux and Altamira, all have imbued his work. Then, Stefani arrived in China. He walked on the Great Wall and the Yellow Mountains in Hefei, which made a dent on him.

His eagerness to venture into new places took him also to the United States: firstly, to Florida, with its influx of Caribbean and South American influences, diversity and fast-paced life and food. He then encountered the Everglades where crocodiles abound, while a fierce storm almost left him stranded and lost and experiencing profound fear. He traveled through cities and towns making friends with the down to earth people. He arrived in Ohio, where he was amazed that communities like the Amish can live within a consumer society without electricity, cars or television. He saw glaciers from thousands of years ago, on an island in Lake Erie, with Canada only nine miles away. A professor took him on a walk through an old cemetery for the mentally ill, where patients years ago were buried with only a number.

This leads us back to his home country, Cyprus. Ancient settlements – some nine thousand years old –, the Troodos Mountain, Byzantine churches with outstanding mural paintings, wines, olives, carob trees… Even here, Stefani continues to journey outside and inside his mind, always making certain that his art constantly renews itself.

Caroline Frances Vargas
Free-lance writer, 2008, Ohio USA

The creation of the Lovers, the Acrobats and the Dancers began in 1998-99. First came the Lovers. By the end of 1999, the figures in these “erotic” works looked like acrobats. During that period, I was teaching in a school in Pafos, the Art room of which was a humid space, far away from the main building and the main entrance to the school. To get into the school, I preferred to jump over the fence on Venizelou Street. I created in my mind a setting with an acrobat as the protagonist, which I connected to my own jump over the fence, and I began to elaborate on the concept of the acrobat: what does it mean? Does it imply the challenge of danger, of the grave risk of falling off the tight rope? Is it an allegory of the artist’s desire to escape from a conservative and aesthetically miserable environment? Or is it, after all, symbolic of his effort to balance opposite factors, in order to secure his physical and spiritual survival?

Parallel to the above process, drawings and paintings were produced – not necessarily in this order and with such ease. Before a painting is finished, it often undergoes countless changes. I also make preliminary studies, in order to get a better grasp of the subject and to find solutions to aesthetic problems. I consider many of these sketches to possess “autonomy” in their own right. The first drawings of “acrobats” were created on February 3, 1999. Since then, I have made hundreds more (mostly in ink): lovers, acrobats, dancers, travelers.

My work – the paintings, as well as the Praxeis (“actions” and installations) – in which the human figure is the central element, derives, I think, from the same internal need. The artist cannot change society on his own, even if he is into political activism. The best thing he can do is to create his work, and to be aware of his limits. But which limits? After all, the artist is constantly obliged to question the established limits. He is obliged to take risks and to embrace the tension of a fragile balance, in order to safeguard his dignity and freedom.

Rinos Stefani, April 2008

In a hieratic attitude of supreme elegance…lovers, acrobats, wayfarers and dancers: the human condition in the mythology of Rinos Stefani’s painting. Text from the catalogue RINOS STEFANI, ACROBATS, 2008 by Dr Antonis Danos, Assistant Professor Art History and Theory, Cyprus University of Technology.

“Rinos Stefani’s painting oeuvre essentially begins in the early years of the 1980s – a decade that marked the re-emergence of painting at the forefront of the international visual arts scene, after years of having been overtaken by other art forms such as, initially, sculpture and then, performance and installation art. The “return” of painting internationally was directly related to, among other things, the economic developments in the West: the financial boost in North America and Western Europe (which, due to conservative neo-liberal policies, benefited mostly the already affluent segments of the population) gave rise to a group of newly rich, relatively young, professionals, who came to be known as yuppies. Part of these people’s self-definition was their interest in art collecting, preferably of paintings.

In Cyprus at the end of the 1970s (when Stefani goes abroad to study art) and in the 1980s (during which, he continues his studies, and he produces the first substantial pieces of work), the factors that affected the art scene are rather different: the political and military events of 1974 violently interrupted (along with everything else) the course of Cypriot art. The 1960s and early ’70s, were years during which a number of artists, most of whom were born between the two World Wars, strove for the “synchronisation” of Cypriot art with international developments. From the end of the 1950s until his death in 1968, Christoforos Savva, with his “Apophasis” gallery, was at the centre of this effort. In the remaining years of the ’60s and the early ’70s, these progressive artists (such as, S. Votsis, A. Chrysochos, A. Savvides, A. Ladommatos, D. Constantinou, N. Kouroushis et al.) continued this “project” with the encouragement and promotion of Greek art critic and curator Tonis Spiteris, who had been appointed advisor on art to the Cypriot government. Spiteris channelled contemporary Cypriot art, often aggressively, in the direction of current trends, such as Minimalism, geometric abstraction and Op Art. The 1974 events, however, interrupted these developments.

In the years that followed, many of the artists who in the 1960s had fully adopted non-representational currents, turned (or returned) to representational, mostly figurative, painting. This turn, as an overall phenomenon, was not in contrast with international developments, since representational art has made a comeback, albeit in new guises. The difference with tendencies in Cyprus at the time, is that some of the local artists (including some important ones) (re)turned to older, conservative manifestations. This goes a long way in proving that the earlier adoption of more contemporary trends had been, at least as far as these artists are concerned, a rather superficial exploration, largely imposed from without. In general, it is difficult to speak of common characteristics of groups or “generations” of Cypriot art, in the post 1974 era. In the years up to the 1990s, in particular, Cypriot artists travelled along “lonely” roads, without the direct contact and interaction or the public discussions, which were common in the local scene, between the late 1950s and early 1970s.

This state, in which Cypriot art found itself from 1980 onwards, allowed also the younger artists to follow individual courses, without them being subjected to any pressure to follow, or to go against, some kind of artistic establishment or a priori imposed directions. Thus, Stefani’s early work (himself classifying it as, “first period” [1983-88] and “Spanish works” [1989-91]) carries obvious references to recent traditions – both Cypriot and international. In paintings such as, Uprooting, Cypriot Window, “…in a hieratic attitude of supreme elegance”.

Lovers, acrobats, wayfarers and dancers: the human condition in the mythology of Rinos Stefani’s painting Scene (all from 1983) and in others, all of which were shown at his first solo exhibition in Cyprus (Gloria Gallery, Nicosia, November 1986), the angst-ridden expressionism of Adamantios Diamantis’ Agonies, from the 1960s, co-exists with the ecumenical symbolism and post-cubist forms of Picasso’s Guernica. On the contrary, abstraction dominates in the pictures he showed in 1989, at London’s “Crypt” gallery (together with Turkish Cypriot artist Sumer Erek). It is an organic kind of abstraction, in works the titles of which allude to Cypriot pre-history and antiquity – Khirokitia I and Khirokitia II, Cypromycenaean I and Cypromycenaean II – but formalistically and in terms of technique, they derive elements from both the abstracts by Christoforos Savva from the mid 1960s, as well as from the wider European environment: an apparent source is the work, in the arte povera tradition, by the Catalan Antoni Tàpies, which Stefani came to know in Barcelona, during 1988-89. Thus, once again Stefani creatively integrates elements from 20th-c. international art together with others from recent Cypriot production – by artists who had before him assimilated, in their own terms, equivalent influences.

Stefani’s more mature and recognisable-as-his-own style begins to appear in works from the 1990s, a time to which Stefani refers (always in regard with his painting) as the “Ultramarine period”. While several of the pictures at the time (such as Irma’s Symplegades [1992] and Maria’s Ultramarine [1992]) remain within abstraction, in some others, human figures begin to appear (interesting example, The Fish Festival, from 1995), that ended up as the trade mark of his most mature and accomplished work (from 1998 onwards).

Even though painting constitutes the main and most substantial aspect of Stefani’s oeuvre, one must not omit a reference to his “actions” and “installations”, also from the 1990s, which were either in the form of performance art or of interventions constructions- installations in public spaces. Although formally or technically they bear little relation to his painting, they were nevertheless imbued with a similar political intent, as that which is encountered in most of his pictures. The political element here is not to be understood in the rather limiting definition of “committed” art or as a noisy manifestation that inevitably carries an expiration date of its possible effect or intended message. Instead, it is meant as the presence of an ecumenical quality, which derives from the continuous exploration and negotiation of the human condition: of erotic, existential and ecological anxieties and dead-ends, but also of the (endless?) effort for a way out, and of the (hopeless?) desire for (inter)personal fulfilment. All of these are manifested in a mood of ambivalence, comical as much as tragic, with a sense of humour, sympathy or caustic critique, as well as in a prevalent sensuality. This sensuality in Stefani’s painting concerns, on one level, technique and colour. His mature work (all earlier influences notwithstanding) is characterised by a consistent expressionism, manifesting itself in the freedom, both in the application of paint on the picture’s surface, and of the design, as well as, in the seemingly naïve quality of the portrayed subjects. This last element betrays influences from various areas in international representational painting: from European Art Brut, from the years following the Second World War, to German neo-expressionism in the 1980s, as well as from Italian Transavanguardia in the same decade, combined with references to “primitive” art.

On another level, the sensuality in Stefani’s work concerns its subject matter. On one hand, it emanates from the eroticism and sexuality of the several “Erotic” pictures. It is always a direct, “natural” sexuality, a “primitive” and, therefore, “pure” eroticism. On the other hand, the sensual element is also contained in the non-apparently erotic or sexual images: the ever-present nudity of the figures presents the human being in its most basic (“natural”) state, stripped of layers of cultural accretions and conventions, even when the figures are sited within the built environment or within nature which, however, bears man’s extensive (often destructive) intervention.

The naked human figure becomes the symbol and the bearer of the (pan)human condition. Among the pictures of couples (erotic and not) and of larger groups, a lone figure stands out – of male gender (the artist’s alter ego?) – as an acrobat, a wayfarer or a dancer. The acrobat is trying to balance on a tight rope, in a pose that is as much comic as it is inconvenient or awkward, in an effort that is probably doomed, though for the time being, it suspends in uncertainty. At times, this figure appears in the role of a planter – literally and metaphorically trying to rejuvenate the world – but most often he takes on the guise of a traveller, “dressed” only with a gas mask, whose only luggage is a sawed tree trunk – what is left from a destroyed or “developed” (for financial gain) environment. The piece of tree under his arm often alludes to a human trunk – a body without limbs – inscribed with a little heart! Bitter humour and sarcasm, along with sympathy for the seemingly confident wayfarer, but his destination looms uncertain or unknown: in the caustic Departure (2005), two figures, facing away from each other (like two aspects of the same self), are “departing”, in equally emphatic manner, toward the exact opposite directions, yet they are holding on to the same piece of wood!

Man…the human person…the free individual…the I…at once torturer and victim…at once hunter and prey…Man – and man alone – […] in the dilapidation and misery of the world – who searches for himself – starting from nothing. […] Aimlessly wandering in the crowd. Man anxious about man, in terror of man. Asserting himself one last time in a hieratic attitude of supreme elegance. […] Man at the stake of his contradictions.2 More recently, the figure of the dancer appears prominent in Stefani’s painting. A figure dancing the zeimbekiko, an anthropomorphic bird with half-opened wings, an allusion to crucifixion; a dancer naked, dressed, alone or in crowds, “of the red land”, “with bull”, “with saws”, “with mask”, “at a black fountain”, “of the moon”… A tangible figure, symbolic, phantom-like – often little more than an outline on the picture surface – here, a physical presence, there, a transparent one, and elsewhere a blank space for the inscription of other shapes or forms. Presence, absence, the artist, the model, I, the other…

Images of a world that is at once familiar and strange or estranged. Like scenes from a play of the theatre of the absurd – the familiar and intimate loom unfamiliar and otherworldly – just as absurd are often the paintings’ titles. Images which refer to the primordial, the primitive, the essential, but also to their extinction or to the severing of our umbilical cord with them. Thus, the planters, the wayfarers and the dancers loom Sisyphus-like images, trapped in an endless, eternal cycle with no redemption. The lovers seem frozen in time, stills from an ancient ritual, foreign to our times. Finally, art emerges once again as the route, the means and the creative process which, regardless of the extent to which it derives its material from life, from “reality” and from nature, it constructs worlds of the artificial, of the sensual and of the symbolic. The picture can thus function as an opening – not the Renaissance window to the world of the senses, but a passage to the subconscious, the imaginary, the utopian or the mythic, ultimately, to whichever alternative “real” is wished for by the artist and the viewer.”

[1]. It spans the period from 1998 to today. It mainly includes the following groups of paintings: “Lovers”, “Acrobats”, “Dancers”, “Planters” and “Wayfarers” (“Amacayacu”).

[2]. From the article, “Reflections on the Statuettes, Figures and Paintings of Alberto Giacometti”, by Francis Ponge, first published in French, in 1951. English translation, in Charles Harrison & Paul Wood, eds., Art in Theory: 1900-1990 (Blackwell, 1992 [2000]), p. 615 (ellipses, apart from […], are in the original text).

Text by Dr. Nadia Anaxagorou, Contemporary Art in Pafos, Catalogue of Pafos Municipal Gallery, 2007

Rinos Stefani articulates a robust idiom with the Mediterranean idiosyncrasy of a gestural expressionism, through his exuberant colour and his dynamic curves, triangles, rectangles, crosses and trapezoids, which engender a magic, transcendental infinity in space. His series of happenings and installations “Soldiers – Targets” and “Human Targets” trigger his aim at transcribing, in painterly means, the impetuous temperament of Zorba, as an embodiment of motion and of inborn sensuality, into dancers, lovers and acrobats. With bold, rich brushstrokes, he embarks upon an exploration of blues, reds and yellows, the subtler tonalities of white and the gradations of brown and tan, abstracting through successive layers, erasing, thus, the immaterial and revealing the quintessence of the people, the landscape and the light of Cyprus.

From  Fileleftheros Newspaper (UC)

Always continuing the endless and dangerous journey of love, walking on stretched rope, as another acrobat, Rinos Stefani tries to balance his art and reality, no matter how hard this might be a struggle for dignity and freedom.
“Amacayacu” is the title of his new work. This strange title comes rather out of his recent journeys to the Amazon river, in China and elsewhere. The human figure predominates once again. Man and the tree are the two main elements of his new work; trees that shrink into mere trunks like the values of our lives.