NAU NUA: STELIOS BAKLAVAS

The movement of light

Stelios Baklavas is a dreamer of the magic of light. His photography comes from his love for silence in order to be conscious of the things around us and ourselves. From the Mediterranean light of Greece, his natural landscape, his works are the result of his faith in making invisible truths become visible, as Paul Klee once said as his definition of art. His photographs of dance performances are the best proof of it, always looking for capturing the aura of the dancers in all its intensity during their performance of a choreography. Stelios Baklavas presents his most recent series Dance energy… and has shared with us his reflections about his work and what he looks for through the artistic creation.

Why did you decide to work with the light?

The light has enchanted me since I was a child hiding every Sunday in the neighborhood cinema and watching films one after the other. In that confined space of the darkened room of the cinema which later became for me the power of the camera obscura, I could feel the magic that manipulating the light entails. Outside in the open air I gradually became aware of the dynamics the energy and the force of the Mediterranean light. It is such a great challenge to handle it, to embrace it and manage not to be overwhelmed by it, and also to create images that take you further than what you see. That is how I decided to “write with/ through the light” which is the etymological root of the word of the word photographer.

One of yours series is called Speechless. What did you want to express?

This project was completed when I was still studying photography. I spelled it all out on paper in detail before I realized it. It took around two months of work for the set to be made. One of the dolls is wrapped in pieces of Greek newspapers and the other in pieces of foreign press upon which there is fragments of both important and frivolous pieces of information. It is a representation of an idea of brain washing, propaganda, manipulation production of role models, dissimulation of the truth. Same as with watching television and other mass media, I saw the press as a mechanism of neutralizing the mind and therefore leading the individual to dumbness, mutism, confusion that leads as a consequence to alienation and absence of speech among people.

Why did you get inspired by hibernation concept?

It is a concept closer to the notion of oblivion than to hibernation. Oblivion versus memory. A situation in relation to the things that mark us and make us who we are. Memory is the tank of happy and painful things of the past. Sometimes these things are too difficult to handle, recalling them makes us panic. Difficult things that we live like illness or loss, leave a recollection that we must face up to. The process can be agonizing. Memory acts against mortification, against the numbing of sensitivity. I described oblivion in my own way so as to exorcise it.

You've created some series dedicated to dance photographs. What's the major difficulty in capturing the movement?

The major difficulty when dealing with dance, this superb form of art, is silence. When during a dance performance the music disappears and one hears the dancers breathing, feels the intensity of the body victorious in its battle with gravity. At this moment of extreme concentration on stage I, as a photographer, must tune in completely I have to fuse with the dancers in order not to disturb or upset in any way what is happening. The aim is to respect their transcendence and be rewarded by the capturing of the magic in these very intimate moments of participation to the energy of the dancers. The aura of a performer can be caught on the lens in a way that the audience cannot grasp at the moment of the dance and I am so happy that I can sometimes show it. Like Paul Klee once said, “Art does not reproduce the visible, rather, it makes visible”.

Speechless, dance, speech, hibernation. What's the silence for you?

Silence is golden, as they say, because it gives time to encounter things and events that surround us in a different dimension. Everything around is loud: TV, advertising, the city, irritated screaming people talking incessantly. Taking the time to stop making noise can be very difficult. Silence forces us to come to terms with it, to listen to our thoughts to look inside, face our fears and practice acceptance. Silence is as precious as speech and truly its necessary precondition. One cannot exist without the other. It is like breathing to man even though we have to learn how to exist in it. As dancers say the fact that we breathe does not presuppose that we do it right. Silence is important to “logos” (reason and speech) as it is to “dialogos” (conversation), and therefore to interaction and exchange.

The most of your series are in color, just one is black and white. Why do you prefer the color?

One tends to be more absorbed in what one is fascinated by. Working with color is for me a greater challenge due to the fact that the human eye perceives everything in color and so it is much more difficult to create something that speaks, that has intensity as a work of art. Black and white appeals to the eye as something strange and it is easier to be drawn to it and create an effect. I have other black and white works that I have not shown yet. Color predominates in my work.

One of your works is called dreams. Where is the boundary between dreams and reality?

It is a very fine line that separates the two. Creators alternate easily between these two realms and this is both their luck and misfortune. Reality is heavy and one needs the dream in order to bear it. Dreams are difficult to shape, they need to become journeys and it is hard to make them yield a truth or a lie that would justify its existence for the artist and for others. It is a game of alternation of role playing. Dreaming is a necessary element of the creative process.

Could you tell us a dream?

“Let us not waste any time let’s enter the dream” (graffiti on an Athens’s wall)

I find myself walking in a busy street in the center of Athens. It is day time and other people are running right next to me. To my left there is a father with his two children. We are running side by side. He is holding the hands of his kids one on each side and the little children are running as well. I look at them in the eyes and the one from the inner side of the sidewalk has blue eyes and the one closer to me has green. The most amazing green and blue color I have ever seen. I put out my hand and take the hand of the child next to me. I feel the soft endearing little hand in my hand as we all run together for a little while. And then I leave them behind and I drift away. This is a recent dream of mine.

Another dream of mine (and on another note) is in the line of Buñuel, Kurosawa, Tarkovski, Truffaut, Borges, Bacon, Van Gogh, Rodin, Scielle , Picasso, Drtikol, Schiele, Munch, Kafka , Dostoievski, Rilke, Baudelaire, Moravia, Sabato, Almodóvar, Kessanlis, Ritsos, Empeirikos, Kounellis, Meletzis and so many others, that art can make reality bearable.

STELIOS BAKLAVAS | DANCE ENERGY... Exhibition here

An interview by Juan Carlos Romero

Stelios Baklavas website www.art-sbaklavas.gr

English translation of Stelios Baklavas answers by Maria Georgilaki,Theory of Art