(20 February 2017) There is time until March 17 to visit the Stefano Samios “Roma / Venezia” photography exhibition on display at the Italian Cultural Institute of Athens (47, Patission) inaugurated on Friday. Samios – who considers himself an ‘amateur’ photographer’ – is “capable of translating the sensations of Rome’s and Venice’s histories, cultures, their realities, into images” according to Antonis Rallis, art historian. The artist studied photography at the University of Paris VIII – St. Dennis and then obtained his masters in applied photography at London’s Middlesex University. Upon his return to Greece, he dedicated himself to photography as a freelancer in the editorial and advertising sector as well as an artist and teacher of photography at the university level. (red)

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Art historian Antonis Rallis states, “Paul Klee once said that an artist’s mission is to make the invisible, visible. This is the first impression I got looking at Stefanos Samios’ photographs inspired by Rome and Venice – “sacred beasts” from the historical, artistic, and cultural point of view. This is because the photographer, in front of such great magnificence, could have easily been ‘crushed’, in both a metaphorical and literal sense, by the richness in imagery in front of him. His eye could have easily fallen into the same unoriginal way these cities are represented, without ever getting really close to discovering their complexity. Samios, instead, can control his subject matter and impose himself onto it, showing the viewer images that exist, that we have probably already seen, but that we had never really looked closely at”.