Stefano Banfi gives life to works with a great visual impact, moving characters and figures full of history and meaning into the digital age.
With his original work, Stefano Banfi reinterprets the masterpiece of universal art, proposing a contemporary vision of classic subjects that acquire a new aesthetic and are charged with different meanings. Through a language that combines elements of pop art, kinetic art and international design, Banfi gives life to works with great visual impact, moving characters and figures full of history and meaning into the digital age. His light boxes represent an innovative synthesis between advertising aesthetics, graphics, design and visual art, like a bridge between apparently distant worlds, united by digital design and the skillful use of light. The artist uses vector lines, paths and digital dots to construct images that appear alive and three-dimensional thanks to the light effect.
His works propose famous subjects from the history of art, ranging from van Eyck's Arnolfini Couple to Munch's Scream, passing through the evocative figures of the jungle by Rousseau, the faces of Arcimboldo and the reinterpretations of Van Gogh's famous self-portraits; and again, revisiting in a contemporary key the sensual figures of Klimt and Tamara de Lempicka, the curves of Botero's women, the famous frontal image of the farmers of American Gothic by Grant Wood and the man with the bowler hat by Magritte, up to the abstract scores of Kandinsky.
With a style that blends traditional icons and a completely personal and innovative style, Banfi charges each subject with a new visual memory, making each image more recognizable for the contemporary viewer. His work is a refined exercise in quotation and reinvention, where light is not only a technical tool, but becomes an essential expressive element. The artist gives back to famous faces and scenes a completely new aura and expressiveness, recreating works that, while evoking the past, speak an aesthetically and conceptually contemporary language.
Banfi’s work has been hosted in important exhibition contexts, from the IV Salerno Biennial in 2021, where his works won second prize in the video art and new technologies section, to the Armenia Colombia International Art Biennial (BIARCO) in 2022, where he won first prize in the Digital Art section. With his reinterpretations of historical icons, Banfi aims to build a new dialogue between past and present, making art closer to a contemporary audience and broadening the horizon of digital art with a poetic and innovative language.
