Eastern Aegean

 

Rooms that adapt precisely to our needs. You might call them prisons or aquariums. A carnivorous bird continuously threatens your eyes, locked inside the room. You are hiding in it. And the bird, in turn, hidden inside you, diving in your blood. Infinite doors in front, behind, everywhere, and all locked. The entire range of black. Sometimes it covers you. Sometimes it is sο small that you can cover it with your little finger. The doors are open just a crack, and the unprotected red is struggling to push through - a cut in the eyes.
   You look.
   Nothing but the sea, as far as the eye can see, with music, pebbles, deep wells. Or just the sea, with a fire
at its center turning into an island. I can still see my wife, a curve of sand with five or six stones, burning in the sun.
   And you chase the bird away from your eyes so that nothing can elude you.
   And all passageways are obliterated.
   And you were imagining all of this.
   And it will return to haunt you.

Yannis Kontos
January 1973

(From the exhibition brochure “Yannis Mihailidis, Eastern Aegean” at the Nees Morfes Gallery, Athens, January 1973)