Rinos Stefani

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.

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’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 interventionsconstructions- 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 work1 (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.

Dr Antonis Danos

Lecturer of Art History and Theory,
Cyprus University of Technology

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

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 “Human – Targets”, “Soldiers – 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, acrobats and planters. 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.

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.

When I saw Rinos Stefani’s paintings many years ago, what impressed me most was the sincerity, which runs through all his work. He still has this effusive directness, which gives his work, power and freshness. He continuously simplifies, keeps what’s important and necessary, the rest disappears. This process requires daring and strong temperament from the part of the artist.

Rinos Stefani is well traveled and many of these "places" are brought into his work. Human figure has been for years the center of his paintings. His lovers, acrobats, dancers move by an inner energy to conquer space and time and they do so with anguish, passion and impetuousness. The paintings of the erotic series brandish intense emotional vibrations, full of eroticism and youthful exuberance. Love without guilt, far from hypocrisies and inhibitions. His visual language comes to a sensual peak and reveals unseen aspects of human experience. He plays with opposites with spontaneity, directness and an unbridled passion. His restless spirit and fertile curiosity turn his images of ordinary things into metaphors of metaphysical phenomena of life and death.

The movements of the post-modern reaction to modernism, of Conceptual Art, Happenings, Performances, Process Art, Earth and site works, Environmental Art etc. arose in Europe and America in the 1960s. In Cyprus, however, until 1990 very few artists had been engaged in these kinds of art.

Rinos Stefani introduced his Praxeis (Actions) in 1990. I started working with him for the first time in Marks on Land, in the Akamas area. We made Earth and site works, using wood, stones, bones and any natural material available. Some of the works were “discovered” by fishermen, shepherds and various “experts”, all of whom confirmed to the Media that they were works done by … Satanists!

From the remote Akamas, Rinos decided to bring his Actions to Nicosia. He filled the Apocalypse Gallery with soil, and on April 10, 1991, he carried out the performance Praxis with Earth. The public’s reactions varied. One “advanced” opinion I remember, was that the artist should have appeared completely naked.

The name “Praxeis”, which Rinos established, was chosen to emphasize the priority of action over theory. Art is not only about statements and theories. On October 27, 1991, he presented the installation Mannequins on Beds at the Tombs of the Kings in Paphos. Another significant Praxis was the happening Maa-Mannequins on July 20, 1992, at Coral Bay beach in Paphos, in which he placed 20 plastic, life-size dolls among the bikini-clad crowd. In a bi-communal exhibition in 1993, he showed the installation Mousetraps at Famagusta Gate, Nicosia, and soon after he took them to the Kyrenia Castle. In July 1993, during a journey to Latin America, he realised the Praxis Osoguaico, in San Agustin, in the Andes of Colombia. Rinos’s most known Praxis is the installation Soldiers-Targets, which was shown at several places Cyprus and abroad, in different versions. In May 1994, during the exhibition of the Pan-Hellenic Art Symposium at Famagusta Gate in Nicosia, three of the Soldiers were stolen. This unprecedented incident fed the media with “polemic” material, and it elicited varied reactions from the Police, the Nicosia Municipality, the Chamber of Fine Arts and others. Only the Ministry of Education and Culture did not react. Among the most tragicomic aspects of this case were the various testimonies that Rinos had to give to the Police. Since then, the “Soldiers-Targets case” remains partly unsolved in the files of the Criminal Investigation Department, under record number Σ/744/94.

In the summer 1998, the American sculptress Elizabeth Doering, the Serbian painter Sasia Savic, Rinos and myself, created the big Sphere, out of trash on a shore of Akamas. I remember an incident in which some officers from the Forestry Department asked us to stop immediately “what we were doing” because we didn’t have permission to collect trash. Two years later, the same group of artists, made the installation sea@net, in a different part of Akamas.

In the summer of 2005, Rinos travelled to the Amazon River and realised the Praxis Amazon, in the area where three countries – Colombia, Peru and Brazil – meet.

The above are only some of the documented facts about the different Praxeis by Rinos Stefani. Each Praxis is accompanied by countless details, which perhaps constitute the real, dynamic relationship between the artwork and the public. And this is, I believe, the meaning of Praxeis – the redefinition of the relationship between the work of art and the viewer. Whereas many artists try to explain their work with texts and presentations, Rinos manages to involve the public in his Praxeis. He achieves this because he invents and uses ambiguous images, which are imbued with power, sarcasm and humour.

Rinos Stefani is challenging the viewing of tradition both in form and theme. His well-laboured thrust creates at best daring combinations of colour attracting and sustaining the eye. Although the artist himself attributes much of his themes to the rural life of his home region, Paphos, he is not offering us static descriptions but dynamic compositions suggesting lyricism on the part of the artist. This young painter is genuinely in search of art in Cyprus.

... The best thing about the paintings by Rinos Stefani is that he knows how to use colour to give spatial structure to his imagery. This is a gift indeed. Even inspired teaching and a real understanding of post cubist art cannot fully give the young artist that ability. You have it or you haven’t. Rinos has, in abundance. His paintings always have that rich and varied, yet fully coherent surface tension which comes of hours of working out through intuitive means, the right size, shape and intensity for a vigorous yet highly sensitive palette. ...

But then Rinos Stefani has what the English call 'the courage of his convictions'. What gives his work its real quality is his ability to reinvent - he tries to find the vocabulary that does not merely present us with a description. He does not simply invite us to look at the subject - we cannot disregard the picture - as a dynamic and dramatic composition which enhances and adds to our perception of the subject matter. For instance his Uprooting (Graham Hamilton Prize 1983) is about a particular event, it effects us because it tells us about a specific human tragedy, but at the same time it evokes a deeper response which comes out of a sense of suffering humanity. The picture has 'depth' in both senses of the word which is what makes it a work of art.