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STÉLIO SCAMANGA

"Scamanga's battle is inside the world of painting. With a full mastery of the painting technique, he searches exclusively, the two dimensions ; he strives to grasp the space, not the dimensions, but its essential mobility. You can include Stelio Scamanga in the heart of the Orient, the Orient of the alchimists and their dreams of pure creation".

Etel Adnan - Poet, Artist and writer

"Stelio Scamanga, is among our talented few. He brought his architectural knowledge to an inborn sensibility of color and form that are tangible and mysterious".

Youssef Al Khal - Poet

"In some of his paintings, we have the impression of going beyond the limits of painting towards an unknown world that Stelio Scamanga seeks to probe, a truth which is not of this world. What is remarkable is that the painter achieves this mystical depth without ever using geometric depth in his paintings. Quite simply through a play of colors and a continuous movement, which ends in the center of the canvas".

Nelly Helou, Art critic

Born in Damascus to Greek parents in 1934 and raised between Syria and Lebanon, Stelio Scamanga’s artistic journey from the late 1950s until his death in 2021, embodied the complex cultural crosscurrents of mid-20th century Middle Eastern art.

Scamanga came to prominence in Beirut during the early 1960s, as a leading light in the city’s art scene, a convenor of fellow artists and a passionate champion of a new language for abstraction straddling territories and traditions . He articulated his ideas in a 1964 manifesto, Toward a New Space: The Perspective of the Abstract.

In 1979, he settled in France, and after in Geneva. It is in this international setting, that Stelio Scamanga would continue his unflagging exploration of matter, colour, and spirituality for many decades to come. For Scamanga, painting was not merely a question of representation or abstracting, but something deeper – almost an act of becoming.

He never stopped exhibiting throughout his life, and his works are now part of numerous international private collections. He died in Geneva in 2021.