MIRAGES V

 

An aged Sinai Monk, was the reason to start photographing again after 16 years, exceeding my fears also to realize that I’m photographing like an art critic not as an artist (I never was an artist). I met Stratos Kalfatis for the first time, at the Cultural Center of Athens, in his exhibitions of some black and white portraits and landscapes, so many years ago that the only remaining in my memory is his visual sight. This visual sight still defines him as Nikos Xidakis s in the preface of his book: “Athos’ – Colors of Faith” (Agras Editions).

A book today, that came in and contacted me from the Publishing House (I thank them warmly, for personal reasons), to show that a series of elements leads to the writing of this text. Primarily Kalafatis photos are non-fictional and imaginary at the same time, both modern and classic, since they balance between contemporary photography and the painting of Delacroix, major as they include holy horror and awe, and fictional, that as another Baudelaire, Kalafatis is dealing with the flowers and the passions of good and evil, the divine and the human…

Emotional and poetical, like the text of Nikos Xidakis, which while initially is the culmination of his Critical Thinking then… through his personal experience of Mount Athos, is poetic… mature… real… The feeling of all that we have experienced as travelers… fellow travelers… the monastic life even for a moment … is common, as is the thrill. In nunneries, there are two sides: the one that shouts… and this one does not concern us and the other that is silent and it offers you the space and time of absolute silence, which is the dignity of thought, which absorbs you… that … you relax … and let yourself … in ‘Garden of Heaven’.

…In addition, while you seek and invent ways of escape on Easter Sunday, since the ritual prohibits meat, the only food is fish, which toughens up the palate and the transition to the stomach, is the Mother Superior that offer it to you: Holy Bread – The culmination of a Week-Holy Week. A Week of: Hospitality, Resting, Silence, Respect to the Ultimate Personal Freedom and… True Love, in a way that only the True Monasticism knows how to express it… with Modesty and simplicity, as Sister Mariam… who posit it on a Plate ritually, as a piece of artwork…

It is the same picture that captures Stratos Kalafatis through his lens, and we are involved in it… Exactly where ego is surpassed, we bow respectfully first in human greatness…the divine is following… first on human soul … the art follows… in human eyes facing the gaze humanistic… head on… without quibbling and witticisms. In this Intersection… of the Absolute… the Art is born… In the Ultimate… in the Immaculate… in the Immaculate… in the Perpetuity… where ego meets ego, so the Us can be born(!)

Efi Michalarou
Tuesday 11/11/14