The dancer appears prominent in Stefani’s work
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, “dancer of the red land”, “dancer 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.
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.
The dancers loom Sisyphus-like images
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 figures 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 naked human figure
The ever-present nudity of Rinos Stefani’s figures presents the human being in its most basic (“natural”) state. The naked figures are stripped of layers of cultural accretions and conventions. This is 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 a lone figure stands out – of male gender (the artist’s alter ego?) – as an acrobat, a wayfarer or a dancer.
Text (extract) from ‘Rinos Stefani – Acrobats’ by Antonis Danos, art theorist, professor at the Cyprus University of Technology, 2008
