[...] "What is the role of a point that has lost its significance? What could the Notre-Dame of Paris mean to a 15th-century Greek who had recently abandoned conquered Constantinople and lost the Hagia Sophia? Which of these two cathedrals is authentic: the Gothic or the Byzantine? Which of the two churches is dedicated to the real Divine Word? Which one houses the heretical, absurd message?"

Nikolas Kalas signed one of the last articles he published in Artforum titled "Against the Return to Normalcy" in December 1983 as a poet, diagnostician, and polemist. He thus delivered a precise and concise autobiographical note.

Nikolas Kalas or Nikos Kalamari or Nikitas Rados or N. Spieros - one of the "brightest and most daring spirits of the time" according to André Breton, alongside Bataille, Peret, Leonora Carrington, Masson, Proust, and others - presented himself as a sharp critic in Greek magazines and as one of the first Greek surrealist poets in the 1930s. In 1938, he published in the circles of the French surrealists, in Esties Pyros, and later in New York, where he took refuge during the War, he actively participated in the modernist movement, managing to become one of the most widely read and militant critics of contemporary art, an advocate for a new and broad activity of art and the revitalization of criticism.
Until his death, he collaborated with the most important art magazines such as View, Village, Voice, Artforum, Arts Magazine, Art International, and collected a large part of his militant and revealing texts on contemporary art in books.
This volume presents the unknown American side of Kalas in Greece - apart from sporadic publications. Published in 1968, it gathers 25 of his most important essays on American heirs of Surrealism, the relationship between poetry and image, Pop Art of the 1960s, contemporary criticism (E. Wind, E. Gombrich, H. Rosenberg, etc.), and artists such as Rauschenberg, Jim Dine, d'Arcangelo, A. Katz, and Al Held. The volume is complemented by his famous aphorisms. "In the midst of silence".