Stelio Scamanga - Sacred Metamorphosis

Taymour Grahne Projects is pleased to present Sacred Metamorphosis, an online solo show by Damascus-born Greek painter Stelio Scamanga (1934–2021), opening virtually on December 1, 2025.

"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 alchemists and their dreams of pure creation".

Etel Adnan - Poet, Artist and writer

"Stelio Scamanga is among our talented few. Since he came into prominence, ten years ago as a promising young painter, he has matured into a world of his own. He brought his architectural knowledge and skill to an inborn sensibility of colour and form that are once tangible and mysterious. I see a lot of poetry in his imagery and approach to artistic expression. This, among other things, tends to make his work typical of our time".

Yousef Al Khal - Poet, Journalist, and Publisher

‘The Necessity of Order in a World of Flux’

Step into Stelio Scamanga’s Metamorphosis series of paintings, executed between 2006 and 2012 and what do you find? Stillness and serenity? Yes. A sense of wonder, as painting evokes architecture and colour embodies spirit? Absolutely. An ineffable sense of harmony, balance and calm? Indubitably. You have entered the otherworldly, expansive horizon of the late artist Stelio Scamanga’s unique vision.

In the Metamorphosis series, on view at Taymour Grahne Projects between December 1, 2025, and January 12, 2026, we encounter eleven contemplative canvases produced at the summit of the late Stelio Scamanga’s remarkable six-decade long career, spanning Damascus to Geneva via Beirut and France. Each painting in this series, from deep fields of violet and green, to a bold, luminous orange square, embodies what Scamanga himself described as ‘the necessity of order in a world of flux’.

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.

While studying for his BA in Architectural Engineering in Beirut in the late 1950s, where he also studied drawing, painting and sculpture, Scamanga travelled to France. There, he met architectural titan Le Corbusier, a thunderclap of an experience that fired the young artist’s passion for rational geometry, proportion, and light. Consequently, his first solo show, in Beirut in March 1960, drew not only upon the landscapes he’d encountered during his travels across France and Italy, but also the radical new ideas he absorbed from European artists and thinkers. And it was abstraction, filtered through a precise architectural and regional sensibility that became Scamanga’s passion.

Alive to the mood of the times, Scamanga’s sought to use this technique in articulating his identity with universal forms, an approach that echoed new directions taken by peers including Saloua Raouda Choucair, Shafic Abboud, and Aref El Rayess. And while Scamanga would, post-graduation, build his career in architectural practice, it was painting - constructing mystical spaces through form and colour - that became his life’s work and legacy.

Scamanga came to prominence in Beirut during the early 1960s, the halcyon era before the civil war, that came to be known as the ‘Golden Sixties’. He was a leading light in the city’s febrile art scene, organising a collective that included peers such as Yvette Sargologo, Nadia Saikali, Mounir Najm, Assem Stetie, Helen Khal and Mohamad Sakr. His commitment to new languages for abstraction straddling territories and traditions led to his publishing an artistic manifesto in 1964, Toward a New Space: The Perspective of the Abstract, explaining the fundamental differences, as he saw them, between the Renaissance perspective of the West and the more spiritual and interior abstraction of the East.

“Five hundred years have passed, and Western painting is still a prisoner of the concept of the middle ground, of Albertian perspective,” the manifesto began. “This stable and symmetrical space, defined by a system of mathematical calculation, composed of discontinuous elements, clearly analysed, where the surprise of metamorphoses is banished, illustrates a Cartesian way of thinking based on development and the concrete world”.

By the early 1970s, Scamanga’s personal idiom of geometrical abstraction had increasingly imbued his canvases with spiritual narratives. He achieved this by artfully deploying spatial organisation to represent aspects of human existence, from the serene to agitated. His ‘threedimensional concept’ saw horizontal and vertical planes sweep waves of energy up and down and across the painting, resulting in work that took profound reflections upon myriad states of being as central to composition and structure. While reluctant to align himself to any single movement, his work clearly drew on the formal rigour of Constructivism, the inner radiance of Colour Field painting, and the contemplative minimalism of spiritual abstraction. We can see the culmination of these ideas and practises deep within the DNA of the Metamorphosis series.

This series, compiled after the artist’s death in December 2021 comprises oils on canvas ranging in scale from 90 to 200 centimeters. They encapsulate the architectural and atmospheric essence of Scamanga’s practice. Again, his ‘three-dimensional’ approach builds up surfaces with layers of glazes, allowing each work to radiate an inner luminosity hovering somewhere between material and immaterial states, suggesting a perpetually unfolding, yielding movement rather than static design. You can’t but help be drawn to these subtle structural shifts that bring energy to the canvas: a circular form dissolving into a field of violet haze; a vertical axis emerging from a glowing centre; a horizon that almost appears to breathe.

This characteristic sense of motion can be seen in Metamorphosis (Dark Green and Purple), (2007) where harmonising tones generate a shimmering tension, as if the painting were alive with unseen energy. Meanwhile, Metamorphosis (Orange) (2010), the surface pulsates with solar intensity - a pure, hovering orange balanced by soft transitions at the edges, recalling Mark Rothko’s late Seagram panels but again, tempered with architectural precision. Metamorphosis (Purple) (2007), the largest painting in the group, sublimates that same tension into a colossal field of colour, where paint seems to ebb outward from a hidden core.

From where - and why - does this artful energy emanate? Simply put, Stelio Scamanga’s art reflected an Eastern sense of the sacred, combined with Western Modernism’s formal discipline. His balanced geometries recall Islamic patterns, yet their emotive colour fields place them firmly within an internationally recognisable language of abstraction from Mondrian to Klee, Malevich to Newman. Formal tensions and congruences, disparate ideas, universal concepts, all collided in service of existential questions. For Scamanga, painting was not merely a question of representation or abstracting, but something deeper – you could say, it was an act of becoming. The shifting tones and forms across these canvases in ‘Metamorphosis’ evoke biological and spiritual processes alike: the growth of a leaf, the emergence of a star, the evolution of consciousness. This work, as with his others, invites viewers to observe how light dances and changes across pigment, how boundaries dissolve, ultimately to participate in a state of flux.

If architecture gave Scamanga his formal boundaries, colour provided emotion and movement. His palette, though restrained, was wonderfully expressive. Purples and violets dominated, conveying introspection and mystery. Greens signalled growth and renewal, while oranges and ochres shimmered with pure warmth, energy, and transcendence. Light does not merely illuminate the surface but actually seems to emanate from within it. As Scamanga wrote in his manifesto back in 1964: ‘The work is conceived as a universe that has its own light, its inner light’.

Standing before these canvases, one senses the culmination of a journey that began in Damascus eight decades ago; a journey through cities, movements, and ideas, resolved at last into pure colour and light. And in the end, Stelio Scamanga’s Metamorphosis is less a conclusion, than a state of grace. These paintings are a serene affirmation that everything, in art as in life, is less being, but perpetually, the process of becoming.

Stelio Scamanga (1934 - 2021) was born in Damascus to Greek parents in 1934 before the family relocated to Beirut in 1952. Scamanga received his Bachelor of Architecture from the American University of Beirut in 1960. Trained as an architect, he began painting inspired by Byzantine iconography, before gravitating towards abstraction. He was a painter renowned for his abstract works blending a passion for architecture with lavish, lyrical expression and was a key figure in shaping the Lebanese artistic scene during Beirut’s golden sixties. He held several solo exhibitions at galleries and venues in Beirut in that era, including in: 1960 at Unesco Palace, 1961 and 1970 at Gallery One, 1972 at Modulart GAllery, and in 1974 at Delta International Gallery. Scamanga has also held solo shows at major European institutions including: Atehenee Museum in Geneva in 1987, Centre Cultural Jean Monnet in Saint Genis, FR in 1989 1997, and 2002. Scamanga left Beirut for Geneva in 1976 and ultimately settled in France in 1970 before passing away in 2021. His work is in the collection of the Sursock Museum, Beirut.

Photo from the Artist's family archive

For the Artist's CV please click here

Photo credit for all artworks in the exhibition: Philippe Tarouriech