NIKI LOIZIDI THE LONG JOURNEY OF RINOS STEFANI While studying Rinos Stefani’s formidable Acrobats series, my mind went to that brief yet revealing “artist’s note” he had incorporated in 2008 into the homonymous catalogue featuring his oil paintings and several ink drawings. In a short autobiographical text, Stefani said: “The creation of Lovers, Acrobats and Dancers began in 1998-99. Lovers came first. By the end of 1999, the figures in Lovers looked like acrobats. At the time, I taught at a Pafos lyceum, where the art classroom was located in a damp basement far from the main building and the school’s main entrance. To enter the school, I preferred jumping over the iron fence on Venizelos Street. In my mind I created a setting whereby the protagonist was an acrobat, hence my leap over the fence, and then I began processing the overall conceptual dimension. What does the acrobat signify? Is it the challenge, the risk of falling from a tight rope? Is it the artist’s wish to flee from a conservative, aesthetically miserable environment? Or is it his need to strike a balance between two opposites for the sake of his physical and mental survival? On 3 February 1999 I made my first drawings with acrobats. I have since made hundreds more, most of them with ink: lovers, acrobats, dancers, travellers”. Artists, litterateurs and poets but also everyday people tend to associate – more or less consciously – particular aspects of their mentality with some act or formative experience they had endured as a culmination of sheer fear, guilt or expectation. It so happens that abstract images or even religious, cosmic or war symbols sometimes serve as undeniable markers of the identity of an artist, of an art movement but also of the specific character of a long-standing folk tradition. Picasso’s identification with the mythical resident of the Cretan Labyrinth, which he had associated with the violent ritual of Spanish bullfighting, is quite telling: “If all the ways I have been along were marked in a map and joined up in a line, it might represent a Minotaur”, Picasso himself had confessed. In the same vein, I would suggest that entire art movements that evolved in parallel to literary, poetic and philosophical movements – more particularly Symbolism during the 19th c. in Europe – had identified with luminous mythical heroes like Orpheus who, in spite of his unmatched dexterity in poetry and music, was met with a tragic death, torn apart by the raving Maenads. The artists’ allegorical identification with Orpheus’ charismatic yet much suffered figure coincided, mostly in 19th c. France, with the findesiècle spirit, an ambience marked by the unraveling of classical cultural tradition which, after the 1789 French Revolution, was drawing further and further away from the new technological and industrial reality. Nevertheless, the long lamentation of the ravaged Orpheus, “struck by the Maenads of the new materialist era” according to Joséphin Péladan, one of many occultists of the time, was not the only response to the challenges of the times. The century before last brought to the fore of Parisian daily life a “sanctuary” of relaxation and grotesque carefreeness which would soon – namely from the mid to the late 19th century – become a space of inspiration and creation for the poetic and artistic avant-garde: the circus, with its well-known protagonists led by the Arlequin, one of multiple versions of the masked clown. It seems that the heroes of this popular “theatre for the masses” have their deepest roots in daemonic divinities of antiquity which from the Hellenistic-Roman drama onwards have survived across various forms of dramaturgic cross-breeding down to the Venetian Commedia dell’ Arte. ARTISTS, ACROBATS AND TRAVELLERS As noted by Swiss writer Jean Starobinski, from the period of Romanticism onwards, one could rightfully look for an odd yet clear identification of the avant-garde artist with the persona of the wandering, usually persecuted clown. Indeed, it is worthy of note that for artists and poets outside the so-called juste milieu, in other words the social status quo, the image of the clown was not a random choice of theme but an oblique, undoubtedly parodic way of revisiting art concerns by way of new aesthetic and social perspectives. From the Romantic era onwards (without excluding precursors from earlier centuries), the pagliaccio, the buffo, the saltimbanque and the clown served as plethoric and consciously disfigured images selected by artists in order to symbolically represent themselves and the social conditions within which they were forced to live. Starobinski is right to note that the circus and the myth or mythic variations regarding the ambiguous protagonists of this marginal yet popular artists’ union first emerged in the field of poetry and literature between 1830 and 1870 before becoming a favourite with avant-garde artists. In a self-made sketch, French poet CharlesBaudelaire likened his traits to the tragic and playful grimace of the clown; author Gustave Flaubert declared that deep down – whether one believed it or not – he was a saltimbanque (letter dated 8 August 1846); the astute author James Joyce had no qualms declaring himself an Irish clown that laughed at the universe. Nevertheless, as far as artists are concerned, they tend to either describe or identify with circus protagonists much more, usually opting for the dancer and acrobat figures. From Pulcinella at the Circus (1800) by Venetian painter Giandomenico Tiepolo to the popular acrobats of wandering troupes (which, in fact, had been gloriously immortalized by Modernist artists from different movements such as Daumier, Picasso, Degas, Lautrec, Seurat, Chagal, Rouault or Klee) the figures of the clown and the acrobat had been construed as symbols of chimaera, of joy but also of a close encounter with danger and death. While walking on tight rope, the saltimbanques are forced to cover ausually short but vertiginous route between life and death, oftentimes with their eyes closed. In cinema, the definitive tragicomic image of the acrobat/clown was rendered by the unparalleled actor and director Charlie Chaplin in the ever-memorable tightrope scene from the film The Circus (1928) where the mustached Chaplin with his trademark hat and cane literally walks a tightrope in the company of two annoying, scared monkeys that cling on him as they keep covering his eyes unwittingly. Bearing this in mind, let us consider the signification of Rinos Stefani’s acrobat, given that by the artist’s own avowal, the concept stems from one of his daily professional “acts” – his leap over the fence on Venizelos street. Was it a leap to freedom, an escape from the misery of the damp basement that hosted art classes? Or was it by contrast a personal, unconventional choice that exposed the intrepid, extraverted character of the artist/wayfarer? In truth, acrobatic figures but also represented objects and motifs in the works of Rinos Stefani are multivalent: they lend themselves to multiple interpretations. But they are also particularly intimate. His acrobats/dancers, agile yet attuned to a deeply earthly, almost orgiastic rhythm, sometimes appear akin to the dancing figures of Picasso and Matisse and other times to figures in tune with a ritual Oriental chord reverberating through the depths of the centuries. With good reason one may wonder whether there is some kinship or narrative continuity between the acrobat/dancers of Rinos Stefani and the fated performers of the roaming Parisian or, more broadly, European circus. Most certainly, the identification of the artist with the personas of the saltimbanque, the social fugitive, the jester, the outcast as well as with the memorable figure of the Arlequin makes for a robust core of tropes with several variations, closely linked to the end of the great traditional narratives of the classical era and the launch of the subversive aesthetics of modernism. Nevertheless, even though Stefani appears to be closely acquainted with both synthetic and aesthetic(“morphoplastic”) quests, and the new symbolic fiction of European modern art, he chooses his own “indigenous” visual art language, bravely enriched with the cultural imprints of his travels across Europe, the USA, Latin America (especially Colombia and Brazil) and China. His preferred figures, mostly male acrobats/dancers and several travellers, precariously walk tightropes or meteorize heavily and passionately as though in a nightmare or in a state of Dionysian trance. I would go as far as to suggest that a common thread running through the acrobats/dancers series is that dark and viscerally passionate atmosphere that “wraps” the figures in impressions of patrons at a night club and at the same time in impressions of Chorus members in some ancient Greek drama. Alone, in small groups or in pairs (Mary’s Rembetika,fig. 1,Dancers of the Red Land, fig.2, Dancers of the Moon, fig.3, Dancer with Mask,fig.4), these figures are symbolic incarnations of the human condition (la condition humaine) on both a personal and a universal level. The marvelous composition titled The White Acrobat (fig. 5, athematic supplement to the Acrobat of Venizelos Street, fig. 6), though painted in the late 1990s, in other words in the early years of this cycle of works, employs austerity of composition and density of meanings to sum up the major landmarks along the personal route of the artist. The tall and slender male figure “opens itself to the light” by fiercely leaping over the fence in an area which symbolically alludes to the transition from the existential inertia and the void into a horizon of freedom, energy and creative anticipation. Up in the sky, there is a long narrow azure shape that resembles a cloud but is much more reminiscent of something earthlier: a woman’s lips. THE SYMBOLS OF THE REVELATION ACCORDING TO STEFANI The truth is you cannot speak of the works of Rinos Stefani without touching upon their profound, violent if lyrical eroticism. We are not dealing with an artist of expressionist affiliations or one that complies with modern trends from the aesthetics of Expressionism but with a creator that nurtures an arduous yearning for life and nature. Nature and a direct appeal to preserve it permeate through Stefani’s body of work and they were there long before he consciously embraced the spirit and objectives of contemporary ecological movements that are gradually gaining adherents from across the globe. After all, the various symbolic variations of acrobats/dancers and travellers in his compositions are suggestive of Apocalyptic scenes where the human species, having damaged the complex, sensitive balances of the system within which it dwells, is faced with the unpredictable consequences of arrogance. Stefani’s travellers wear asphyxiating surgical masks that cover their entire face (Traveller with a tree trunk, Hefei Travellers, fig. 7 and 8 respectively) rushing in ignorance and misbelief along a path that appears to lead nowhere. In their hands they are holding logs as though sad spoils, while volumes of timber around them ominously allude to irreparable disaster. In some particularly conspicuous works such as Grating of Teeth on a Saw or Grating of Teeth (fig. 9 and 10), the amputated tree trunks are reminiscent of human figures in supplication. More specifically in Grating of Teeth, the lamentation of the three female figures in the foreground of the composition invokes or rather relates to a “forest” of anthropomorphous trunks gesticulating in a manner that conjures up the lament of the Chorus in an ancient Greek play. Oddly (in a way that I find difficult to explain through a strictly stylistic approach) the three figures in the foreground, bewailing their repentance and guilt, appear to perform in a variation of Paradise Lost. As soon as I laid eyes upon Grating of Teeth I was deeply impressed by the poignantly emotive power of the image, before unwittingly giving in to a sudden yet not unlikely connotation whereby the despaired figures of Grating of Teeth were associated with the figures of the protoplasts on Masaccio’s fresco in the Brancacci Chapel of Santa Maria dell’ Carmine in Florence (1425- 1427). As opposed to the thematically equivalent fresco of Masolino that decorates the same Chapel, The Expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden by Masaccio is defined by vividly modern elements conveyed through movements and gestures of anguish and the crushed expressions of Adam but mostly of the wailing Eve (fig. 8 and 9). After all, Early Renaissance artists, in spite of their interest and methodical research in the classic structure and arrangement of the composition, took the first important steps towards rendering the psychological depth of depicted figures. The cultivation of the chiaroscuro technique (differentiated areas of light and dark) which reached its apex with Leonardo da Vinci, Caravaggio and, during the Dutch 17th c. with the masterpieces of Rembrandt van Rijn, coincided with the need of Western Civilization to apply particular tension and depth to the narratives of the biblical or the cosmic story. Therefore, odd though it may seem, Grating of Teeth shares common mythographic elements with the expulsion of the protoplasts in the sense that the lamentation of the three naked figures in the foreground of the composition stems from the awareness of the consequences of a mistake: the barbarous and catastrophic intervention of man against nature. Human intervention is represented by the grating of the saws, a symbolic reference to human greed which has, for some time now, brought the planet on the verge of becoming Calvary, “a site of skulls”. The mask is an “accessory” which often supplements the action of Rinos Stefani’s tireless wayfarers, dancers and travellers. As opposed to the view of theoretician Jacques Bril who maintained that the man of the industrial and technological era had stopped investing the centuries-long history of the mask with new symbolic nuances, in our days the murderous global pandemic has abruptly turned the mask into a powerful apotropaic element – explicit, functional and unromantic. The mask as a bearer of awe against death now functions as a tool of exorcism and protection from fatal threat. Still, in art, the mask or prosopeion has to this day played a polysemic if ambiguous role. In painting just as in the theatre or even in media of expression attuned to contemporary technology, the use of a mask takes on new, often provocative symbolisms associated with political and social ideology. Let’s not forget that the symbol of contemporary social and political activism is precisely the Anonymous Mask (fig. 11) which often sprouts up through crowds of enraged protesters in gatherings incited by different social groups for different purposes. In the works of Rinos Stefani too, the depiction of the mask betrays a profound and firmly established view of the human condition and the nature of things. Along general lines I would say that these accessories resemble blinding instruments, prison gags (Guantanamo Dancers, fig. 12) or gas masks used by soldiers in World War I (Dancers of the Moon, fig. 3 and Dancer with Mask, fig. 4). In the composition titled Amacayacu (fig. 13), travelers carry pales wearing sharp objects that look like bomb shells or like a bird’s beak. Of course, the association with the bird’s beak is implicitly linked to the masks of Plague Doctors (fig. 14) which invoke the long period of the Dark Ages when bubonic plague had claimed the lives of one third of Europe’s population. While “doctors” at the time were irrelevant and by and large clueless quacks and small-time professionals, the protective masks they wore were immensely interesting (fig. 15). This is why their uncanny, threatening shape and symbolic insinuations about sickness and death have survived to this day in revel and mystery rituals such as the Carnival of Venice. ETERNAL REPETITION OF LIFE AND DEATH Nevertheless, I am not inclined to the view that the works of Rinos Stefani are characterized by despair and bleakness. Next to the piled-up pales of denuded trees within a dense atmosphere of fire and drought, bucolic memories and symbols of love and life spring up in the form of embraced couples (The Lovers’ Forest, fig. 14) or a stone-made source of ever-flowing fresh water where people and animals quench their thirst (The Fountain at Tala, fig.16). The recurrent presence of acrobats in Stefani’s compositions is far from random. After all, acrobats can never be good in what they are doing unless they first develop their balance skills. Stefani has definitely learned from a young age to observe and even to understand the hidden but extremely complex and sensitive balance of nature. In 2014, I had the good fortune of working with him in the context of an exhibition I was setting up for the Pafos Archaeological Museum entitled Trauma and Therapy: Cypriot Antiquity and Contemporary Art. Inside the museum, Stefani put together an inspiring installation titled Homo Triticus (fig. 17) which conjured up the eternal repetition of life and death. Next to a museum exhibit, specifically a skeleton lying in a manmade tomb dated to 3000 BC, Stefani installed a four-sided frame filled with earth and wheat seeds which sprouted in the shape of a grassy human form. The green man wore a “mask” shaped after a funnel which was attached through a plastic tube to a larger funnel, filled with wheat seeds. The funnel was affixed to a metallic stick, alluding to an IV tube over the head of a patient in a hospital bed. As I wrote in the catalogue of the exhibition– which served as artistic herald of Pafos – European Capital of Culture 2017: “Life and death, the rebirth of nature and decay, illness and fruition, coexist within the very same, eternally repeated cycle of ecumenical sowing.” I should point out here that in my view the concept ‘ecumenical’ is culturally and morally more encompassing than universality. Deriving from the Greek word oikoumenikos [‘from the whole world’] which is etymologically linked to the concept of oikos [‘house’, ‘habitation’], the word ecumenical is employed for someone that, before setting out for the long road ahead, has gained a profound and spiritually clear knowledge of the place they inhabit regardless how small. In this sense, the White Acrobat (fig. 5) is the work that marks the beginning of Stefani’s venture into self-knowledge. Writer Caroline Francis Vargas, in her 2008 contribution to the book Acrobats by Rinos Stefani likens the Cypriot artist’s itinerary to that of Peregrino, the first-person hero of Portuguese author Fernando Pessoa who had learned “not to look at the road but to follow it”. Stefani followed the road from the land of Cyprus to England, Berlin, SouthAmerica, Bogota and the Amazon “where Colombia meets Peru and Brazil” and there he caught piranhas while watching trunks– later reproduced in his paintings – flow down the river. Then came Spain and France, the dip into the Paleolithic Age through visits to the caves of Altamira and Lascaux that left a deep imprint on him and urged him to look beyond theories into the deeper necessity of art as medium of knowledge and familiarization with the ever-inconceivable reality of the surrounding nature. The tireless wayfarer travelled as far as China, walked along the Chinese Wall and the Yellow Mountains of Hefei, then to the United States of America, where he came into contact with communities detached from Western civilization. There, he often found himself in the midst of storms that left him “lost and flabbergasted” as though he had been abruptly transferred under a different sky. From the 1990’s until his recent ecological interventions in the Akamas area (in the context of Pafos – European Capital of Culture 2017), Rinos Stefani has left his travelling “footprints” upon cities and regions of Cyprus (Pafos, Nicosia, Ammochostos) but also on the Colombian Andes and in the Amazon, specifically at the meeting point between three countries– Brazil, Colombia and Peru. According to Susan Vargas, an exceptional visual artist and the partner of Rinos Stefani in art and life, the word Praxeis [‘Actions’] was chosen by himself in order to “prioritize action over theory”. After all, Stefani’s Praxeis are not far from becoming “archetypes” of human creativity, in as much as marks, installations or artistic interventions that employ authentic natural materials such as wood, stones, earth, bones (fig. 18 and 19) reconnect man with his timeless, brave but also fatally conflicting rapport with Nature. The best known of these Praxeis is the Soldiers- Targets installation (1994), an artwork ensconced in sarcasm, biting humour and ambiguous spirit (fig. 20). I would add that sarcasm and irony, mostly wit, shines discreetly but ever so playfully through most of Stefani’s artworks. I was relieved to detect such tender, discreet hints of humour in cycles of works of a religious content such as the cycle of St Neophytos the Recluse (fig. 21). Does this equal “a hieratic attitude of utter elegance” as art historian Antonis Danos had written about Stefani’s body of work or perhaps “a hieratic attitude of utter hilarity” which in no case demolishes the sense of sacredness? I believe that for Rinos Stefani the sense of sacredness is not only linked to experiences and narratives of Christian Orthodoxy but to all ancient and more recent cultures and religions, including Animism and the worship of spirits as expressed in the masks and sculptures of people living in anthropologically unmapped areas of South America and Australia. By looking at his photographs from the Amazon jungle, where he poses smiling between indigenous women and children – from the Andes of Colombia to Ohio, USA and from there to Hefei, China, the difference between softy traveller and peregrine becomes visceral: it is what distinguishes the relaxed, ignorant traveller who thinks he has seen and admired all there is from the pilgrim/traveller who looks at everything as mystic and unknown as though in a feeling of déjà vu. Rinos Stefani belongs to the rare – if not altogether scarce – genre of travellers/pilgrims who open heartedly and with tender curiosity receive what the “Other” may offer them, whether it be a little or a lot. Above all, he always seems to feel relevant and receptive to the way of life of those who will teach him more about himself. Without wishing to bind the artist to embrace my view, I would dare say that rarely did the Western man see clearly and selflessly, without greed and expansionist visions the hitherto unknown places he visited. In Rinos Stefani’s compositions, women and men wear masks like gags and come and go carrying bare trunks. In the background of these uncanny settings there are rows of tall, denuded trees with dried branches, posed as though in mourning or in supplication. I can still remember that, as a child, I resented reading stories about missionaries striving to “save” the souls of the wretched natives that lived deep into the jungle. The invention of photography in the mid-19th c. was the springboard that launched the immortalization of many of the most glorious but also saddest moments of “civilized” society. I will never forget how shocked I felt on seeing a short film (shot as anthropological documentary) on the indigenous peoples of Patagonia living in the southernmost part of South America between Argentina and Chile. They walked around naked or dressed in wild animal hides to protect themselves from the cold and they looked at visitors scared and unsmiling, through unkempt patches of straight hair. They seemed harmless but cautious. Their instinctive reactions were certainly beyond justified: it wasn’t long before the teenage girls of Patagonia, formerly bare-breasted and free like nature, faced the camera lens with the eyes of captured prey, dressed in long robes and tightly buttoned collars like strait jackets. Standing upright in the back row of the photograph, proud of their work, were a few nuns with huge hats, white and collared, members of the special mission that was tasked with transmitting the light of civilization and the grace of religion to the wild people of the glaciers. THE MOST RECENT TURN ALONG THE WAY An Irrefutable [‘Apsevdis’] Reading of Ancestral History by Rinos Stefani In the short story O Peregrino (The Pilgrim) by Fernando Pessoa, the young protagonist comes across a mysterious man who appears to incarnate the forces of the writer’s personal destiny, then goes on to become a tireless pilgrim travelling the world in search of some elusive, ever-transient truth. The big question raised by the Portuguese writer’s pilgrim has to do with the driving forces that guide his steps. Who is it that eventually makes the fatal choice? And do all these forces happen to lead nowhere because it could well be that the “peregrination” is merely an illusion – a circular, incessant wandering around the same point? This interpretation of the “unmoving predicament” would befit the compositions that depict not as much the tightrope walker or the wayfarer (who carries bricks or tree trunks) but those that depict dark figures of dancers holding poses reminiscent of zeibekiko, an Anatolian dance of supplication, of challenge but also of secret submission to fate. Critic C. Frances, summing up her remarks on the particularly impressive kinesiology of the zeibekiko, points out that this dance, which in one moment touches the earth and in another reaches for the sky, is the ultimate expression of human dignity. The art works of Rinos Stefani exude a strong sense of agony over the will to overcome all the obstacles that render human life difficult if not intimidating. The artworks made soon before the closure of Stefani’s penultimate painting period (2000-2010) employ sharp expressionist prowess to condense the agonizing passage of an essentially blinded man through a forest of saws as in Dancer with Saws (fig. 21, 2007). I would suggest the same for Dancer at Black Fountain (fig.22, 2007) where the human figure is a combination of the dancer with the traveller as he steps heavily upon a chess board while next to him a long uphill road, widely white and challenging, seems to lead to what we tend to call “the future”. At the turn on the right of this road, there is a black stone water feature, also present in other works of the artist, perhaps as a symbol of the water that neither quenches the thirst nor revives. I believe that Rinos Stefani is one of the few artists that can be said to renew the language of Cypriot art and in that he is one of the foremost representatives of contemporary art in Cyprus. In his works of the recent period 2012 – 2025 he exposes, I believe, a personal and at the same time collective narrative about Cypriot History: the history that has been officially recorded as a succession of dynasties upon the land of a people that was never blessed with freedom; and the history that has been officially forgotten (such as the unprecedented popular uprising against the Francs in 1426), perhaps because nobody stood – or stands to this day – to gain anything from remembering it. In Stefani’s 1999-2009 period, the tightrope walker, the dancer and the traveller, the three symbolic personae of the artist in search of routes of acquaintance with the past, the present and the future, appear to fuse into an entity of timeless charm and prestige. Stefani has always been a creator with wide open horizons, nurturing a vibrant, friendly curiosity about the way of life and thinking of other civilizations; above all, he has been an artist of profound social and political engagement. But what makes him stand apart from several fellow artists in his native Cyprus is the fact that in a densely narrative composition titled ReAlexis (fig.23), he brings to the surface one of the most dramatic but also greatly “suppressed” aspects of Cypriot History. And this because the island’s rural people, led by popular hero Alexis, rose for months against the long-standing Frankish rule. It is only right then that Stefani would dedicate to this almost unknown epic one of his most significant works. I personally believe that what he has endeavoured to adumbrate, above all, is the eminent if brief role of simple folk in the historical developments of the time. The history of Cyprus has been regrettably reduced to “reading” a narrative of successive conquests and conquerors from East and West, that ruled with an iron fist in a place destined for permanent slavery. Nevertheless, the historical dimension in the art of Rinos Stefani goes beyond a linear narration of wars and brutal slaughters such as the above mentioned revolutionary uprising of Cypriot farmers against the dynasty of the Francs, also recorded in the chronicle of Leontios Machairas. Stefani sees the historical present through the events of the past; and the past through the painful experiences of the present. For instance, it is not by accident that in the diptych titled ReAlexis the diagonally arranged saw (a major symbol of his work of the past fifteen years) is prominently positioned as indisputable reference on the danger of obliteration, more so on the danger of partition of the island. Still, the greatest allure of the work should be sought in its inventive and equally witty style. While studying the composition, one has the feeling that it encompasses (in both sound and image) the crowds of risen people, the decapitated heads of the revolted slaves, the wailing of the martyrs, the wreathed head of the hero ReAlexis, but also memories from the Turkish invasion of 1974. Perhaps my next statement would seem rather contradictory, on the verge of an oxymoron, but Rinos Stefani’s contemporary – indeed very contemporary – modality is largely inspired from the Byzantine artistic tradition and training. I hold firm in my position that for someone to express themselves in an internationally understandable language, they must above all be well versed in their own language. The inspired assimilation of styles of the Byzantine and post-Byzantine tradition may be discerned across several works of this period, but for reasons I will explain further below, it is particularly discernible in a composition of political-satirical edge titled The Faithful (fig.24.) Depicted on the left side of this daringly designed diptych is the figure of a politician (clad in a suit without trousers); the right side is dominated by the figure of a Bishop, worshipped by various yes-men, bending the knee, tongues hanging from their mouth. In almost the same way and in even more vulgar positions, the faithful adherents “worship” the “popular” politician who is missing his pants. Evidently, the despicable figures of the flatterers that support the two predominant power figures, representatives of politics and the church, are inspired from the exceptional frescoes depicting the damned in many monastery churches in Cyprus, Greece and the broader Orthodox world. Of course, the treatment of such topics is anything but easy: where the artist castigates figures of political and religious power, there lurks the risk of didacticism or easy propaganda which usually tilts to cartooning. Infact, the risk is even greater when the depicted figures invoke familiar personalities of the country’s political and cultural life. Either instinctively or consciously, Stefani has avoided the trap of cartoonist criticism. The question is not the challenge itself but the discovery of the causes that have willed the subversive challenge into being, or still do. This rich thematic repertoire of the last ten years incorporates motifs and sporadic images conjuring up memories from the artist’s childhood. These motifs, for instance fountains, dry wall masonry, animals and cut trees appear in earlier works too, quite simply because they make up the deepest and most authentic core of Rinos Stefani’s personal fiction. Man Carrying Stones (fig. 25) clearly manifests the deep, genuine relation of the artist to the earth and his childhood. The artist himself confesses that when he was 13 he began helping his father with rural tasks and that after plowing he was charged with clearing the area from stones. In this particular composition, the young boy, painted like a shadow, carries an armful of stones that give the impression of being part of his body. Memories of “built” bodies are also traced in the Golden Gate (fig. 26), which by the artist’s own avowal is also inspired from the very specific Byzantine painting of Cyprus. Though critically disposed against the hierarchy of the church, Stefani sets out to tell stories of contemporary tragedies from the history of the island by drawing on primary narratives of the Old Testament such as Abel and Cain, Joachim and Anna meeting at the Golden Gate, or even the biblical myth of the protoplasts which has for centuries served as archetype of the “guilty” drives of Christian humanity. Justly and quite inventively, Stefani interweaves biblical drama such as the story of Abel and Cain (fig. 27) with the tragic contemporary consequences of domestic discord but also of the greedy claims of foreigners on the island as in Buffer Zone (fig.28). I would like to close this narrative of Stefani’s long journey – which, I’m sure, is far from reaching its end – with a reference on Crawling Man (fig.28). This composition, like all the others I have discussed so far, is painted with a plain palette of white, grey and black and seems to condense the human peripeteia– actually its present-day state –with simple means but not without sarcastic insinuations: it took some pithecoid mammal millions of years to attain the (proper) posture that would allow him to evolve into a human being; still, today, the man of the technological era essentially resembles a gagged ape surrounded by crawling animals, kneeling anthropoids and bare tree trunks rendered in schematic supplication. IN LIEU OF AN EPILOGUE Contemporary art movements that coexist (not by chance) with post-industrialist modernism are particularly sensitive about the damage inflicted upon the natural environment by the “progress”, nowadays leaping progress, of new technologies. However, in spite of the agreeable, often interesting protest of art representatives worldwide, criticisms about the blind and thoughtless destruction of the planet have been restricted to a rather superficial level. Oftentimes, art follows the impressive maneuvers of fashion but in this particular case I would suggest that one can hardly “play” or improvise with a topic that is really about humanity’s self-destruction. After all, not many can boast a genuine contact with nature. The green grassed man, Stefani’s Homo Triticus for the Trauma and Therapy exhibition, was a convincing validation of the artist’s ability to engage with the elements of our natural environment. And this because he is one of only a few artists aware of the beneficial properties but also of the immeasurably catastrophic powers of our surrounding world. I saw him sowing once and in truth he moved as though he were painting. NIKI LOIZIDI Professor Emeritus in the History of Art Athens School of FineArts Translated from Greek by Despina Pirketti
