STATEMENT:Dear Kore

Dear Kore*,

I had been feeling – already since the time we lost Vlassis, and as the landscape around me was beginning to settle – a large void in our values and quality of life, and this void is none other than the tenderness that stems from love, a tenderness understood as social consideration.
Caniaris’ work, in reality, is a caress.
What he lays down is his tenderness.
We (often) feel this tenderness to be missing, although it is present and self-evident. We can’t recognize it because other stuff gets in the way, (the various) “needs that must be met”, that don’t include this tenderness, because love entails presence, time as “here and now”, time to be involved, while we are in a constant race against the clock.
But I believe that art cannot exist without complicity; without precision and clarity. More and more we confuse muddled with deep waters. As a result people feel that modern art is irrelevant to them, that they cannot access it, because it presupposes clear philosophical foundations, difficult readings. How can one approach a picture, when they read into it allusions on nearly all western and eastern philosophy?
I have the conviction that, although the artist must have strong foundational groundings, the image – as the embodiment of meaning – should appeal to the body.
We should approach the problem from its roots,
and that is the gaze that becomes transformed to admiration,
transmuted to wonder,
turned into a question.
What am I looking at?
From the beginning (ab initio)
What am I seeing?
Literally.
My study (eros, strong desire) is based on this question: “what do I see?”
Not to express myself (whether I am in pain or not is of no interest to anyone), but to say what I am really reading in the text / what I am seeing in the object.
As long as I read / see, I am in that felt moment, and that is when the unstated can be communicated, that is when the initiation can occur.
What I am trying to say is that, in reality, we need a particular kind of sweetness, of kindness (whether it happens in a state of alertness or not is irrelevant) that can transfix us and force us to close our eyes momentarily so we can taste it as deeply as possible.
And then you can say, yes, this is worth it,
life is beautiful for/in that (moment),
this moment is endless,
I could see all my existence in this moment….
Because, for one little moment, I became what I felt in this condition, and I became filled with love. God is love and love is a means, a caress; what is required (for this process to happen) is a method, an embodiment. The flesh.
Eros, desire, lust, love.
Personally, I felt fulfilled at the sight of a wild weed that can sprout anywhere, under the harshest conditions; from the sight of a “nothing” that you can either disregard, or stand still and watch.
So I have nothing to say, except that I remember a warrior in a movie standing in front of a blossomed cherry tree right before a battle and telling his opponent that he could stare at these flowers for a lifetime, without considering his life to have been wasted.
I have been working on this for nearly four years.

Panagiotis Koulouras

Translation from Greek: Irini Skaliora

* in greek, Kore (Kόρη) has the same spelling as “daughter”, “young woman”, but also the “iris of the eye”, hence the double innuendo and play on words.