Eclipse, 1994

Nikos Stephanou was involved in painting stage sets from the age of 16, while from 1959 he systematically produced sets in the state theatres and worked with independent companies. During his time in Paris, where he went in 1960 for theatre studies, he attended painting lessons at the École des Beaux Arts for two years. In parallel with theatre, he was engaged in painting. In his work he portrays the emotions of his childhood in Athens, the pictures which his eye takes in at a single glance from the window, the light and the sea of Kea - his favourite island. With the influence of the theatre, in which he worked from his adolescence, apparent, he creates a picture with a special sense of the background which is no longer existent but brought into existence. Unlike what happens in the theatre, the objects are lightly positioned, as if hovering in a fluid and mobile atmosphere. Colours in low tones, everyday objects, rendered with the spontaneity and purity of first sight, create a painted image which has a dreamlike, childlike - almost metaphysical - quality.