Journal // The Meadow of Illusions

«To experience the world on an everyday basis is to experience a universe in colour; a fact which gave rise to a most superficial argument: that colour photography is more “real”, more “realistic”, more “direct”, more “believable” than the black and white process, which was ascribed a more abstract dimension.

Kalafatis is saying to us: follow me so we can experience together everything photography is empowered to reveal, but which the limits of our vision prevent us from seeing clearly as we explore a landscape or arrive at a beach. He is inviting us to melt into the materiality of his pigments, which move from yellow to green, and blue to yellow via a succession of the subtlest intensities of light.

And it is out of this materiality of colour—which has become, in the true sense of the word, the subject of his photographic approach—that a quest aimed at the very nature of reality as we perceive it via our senses is born. These colours lie at opposite poles of any supposed realism in photography that has become what it must truly be: a way of questioning the contemporary world and exploring its limits; a means of introspecting on the illusion of our perceptions of everyday reality, our partial blindness, the paucity of our attention, the conventionality of our way of seeing.»

Christian Caujolle, Artistic Director of the VU Gallery in Paris.