The paintings of Lovers are important part of Rinos Stefani’s work. What dominates his images is the mingled figures in blatantly exploding erotic positions. His figures seem to be over the moon at the peak of erotic frenzy. It is a primitive eroticism. There is an unrestrained sexual sensuality, together with a savagery that accompanies it outside social conventionalities.
Stefani’s lovers seem like images of a primordial ritual
Text by Dr Andri Michael, art historian, Faculty of Art [UPJV], Amiens, France: The creative process of Rinos Stefani , 2010 Exhibition “The Body: Stories and Representations”, Evagoras Lanitis Centre, Limassol, 2010
The key element that dominates in Rinos Stefani’s images is the mingled figures in blatantly exploding erotic positions. His figures 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. Artaud 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. They float – both an image and a symbol of the boldness of the artist, who plays with fire.
The sensuality in Stefani’s paintings of Lovers
Text by art theorist Antonis Danos, professor at the Cyprus University of Technology, 2008
This sensuality in Stefani’s painting concerns, on one level, technique and colour. His work is characterized by a consistent expressionism. It becomes apparent in the freedom, both in the application of paint on the picture’s surface, and of the design. We can also see it 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. One can also observe influences from the Italian Transavanguardia, combined with references to “primitive” art.
At 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. Therefore he strips the figures of layers of cultural accretions and conventions. Even when the figures exist in the built environment or within nature, which, however, bears man’s extensive (often destructive) intervention.
A work full of tension
Glyn Hughes, Cyprus Weekly, 19.11.1999, Exhibition Opus Gallery
The most important aspect of this work is that Rinos is not afraid to express his artist’s roots. These are surely in cubism and human concern. Steeped in the great art movements of this century and with an aesthetic eye of his own he can afford to play with forms whichever way he likes. As is obvious in this life enhancing show he uses his considerable imagination and grasp of a larger palette than we usually see here. Therefore he produces works of considerable excellence marked by his own individual talent. The superb selection of high-wire figurations are full of tension. Nice, too, to see Eros used frontally.
The Lovers or Erotic paintings by Rinos Stefani were first exhibited in Nicosia, 1999.
