Rinos Stefani’s Black and White paintings reflect our fears towards war and terrorism, the rise of fascist movements and huge waves of uprooting of people. They seem to be an expression of today’s general crisis. The cruciform figure of the zeibekiko Dancer becomes dominant. The Black and White paintings began in 2006.
Black and White paintings
The Black and White paintings belong to the same thematic series of Exographies and A thousand Drawings of Hell. Stefani first did a series of Black and White paintings with industrial paints on hardboard. The subject was about St. Neophytos and Apsevdis.
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.
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.