SPANISH WORK, 1989 – 1991

Text by Dr. Antonis Danos, Assistant Professor, Cyprus University of Technology, 2008, Rinos Stefani – Acrobats

Stefani’s early work and his “Spanish works” [1989-91]) carries obvious references to recent traditions – both Cypriot and international. In paintings such as, Uprooting, Cypriot Window, 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. 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.