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Modern mythologies Men can do nothing without the fiction of a beginning. Even, science with strict standards, is held to invent an imaginary unity, and set from one point in the endless journey of stars, where the sidereal clock will be able to claim that it is set to the point Zero. It is agreed, that “poetry” the grandmother of Science, less precise, begins in the “middle”; but thinking about it, the process does not seem to differ too much, since even Science calculates forwards and backwards subdividing itself in billions of small units, even with the needle to the point zero begins in reality “in media res”. (George Eliot, Daniel Deronda) Horace defined this “in media res” in the Art of Poetry. Christos Kalfas leaves us with a series of drawings and paintings that, while privileging the image, become assimilated to the poetic expression. His images are found “in the middle” of a circle which is a head drawn in outline. The pictorial elements are either set inside, outside, or in between the lines and its contents. The effect is impressive by its number, the endless range of combinations that we can make up ourselves, give us a delight comparable to the one of poetry. And Kalfas likes to search for that dialogue with the viewer. As always, using his talent for adaptation, he introduces us to his “actors” in the arena which is the head - marked out by triangle points which are the mouth, the ear and the nose. The eye is right in the middle, but it can be set off in its turn such as the other orifices. This visual structure, as canonical as a sonnet, is not a restrain but on the contrary gives a strange freedom to the creative impulses. The classical painters were following the diktats of the liturgical content, or simply the data of a pictorial tradition such as the vanitas. Modern painting has broken all the rules, leaving the contemporary painter to the “point zero”. As Barnett Newman put it: “We free ourselves from impedimenta which are memory, association, nostalgia, legend, myths, or whatever you want which were the “mechanisms” of the Western European painting. Instead of building cathedrals dedicated to Christ, to Man, to life, we do it ourselves from our own sensations. The image that we reproduce is a concrete, real and evident revelation that can be understandable by anyone who wants to watch it without the nostalgic look of history.” If this beginning “in the middle” was the modus of poetry why would it not be the departure point of Kalfas’s work? As Parmenide declared “It does not matter to me if I have to start from one point or another. To that point I will again come back”. Putting the world to rights from a head - that seems to be Kalfas’s motto. By itself, the head is a powerful symbol: compared to the circle and to the sphere it becomes universe and perfection. Inside that space a specific iconographic world bustles around – bestiary – a corpus of signs, lines – alphabet of images; here the artist starts from the image in order to get to the concept. We go back to a system of far more archaic expressions – where the image is build for a meaning. There Kalfas creates a personal mythology which can be read from different ways and which takes us back to his entire work – there are some recognition and call up to camels, monkeys, and above all, to man who strolls in that world kept at the size of the other characters – and often taking an inferior place to his own members. And above all his so tiny compared to the head which surrounds him. Kalfas has never lost his distance and sense of humour, his small characters go by most of the time in daily events, and those repeated actions are ironical, funny, ridiculous and so on. The whole experience has become the lexicon of a poetic and a lyrical universe which bounds the plot from human creativity – why this and not that – why here and not there. Sydney Picasso |
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