What is the role of a point that has lost its significance? What might Notre-Dame de Paris have meant to a Greek of the 15th century who had recently abandoned the besieged Constantinople and lost Hagia Sophia? Of these two cathedrals, which is the authentic one: the Gothic or the Byzantine? Which of these two churches is dedicated to the true Divine Word? Which houses the heretical, the absurd message?

Nicolas Calas signed one of the last articles he published in Artforum titled 'Against the Return to Normalcy' in December 1983 as a poet, diagnostician, and polemicist. In doing so, he delivered a precise and unembellished autobiographical note.

Nicolas Calas, or Nikos Kalamaris or Nikitas Randos or N. Spieros -one of the 'brightest and boldest spirits of the time' according to André Breton, alongside Bataille, Peret, Leonora Carrington, Masson, Proust, and others- emerged as a sharp critic in Greek magazines and as one of the first Greek surrealist poets of the 1930s.

In 1938, he published, within the ranks of the French surrealists, in Fire Foci and later in New York, where he fled with the War, actively participating in the modernism movement, managing to become one of the most widely read and combative critics of contemporary art, advocating for a new and broad activity of art and the renewal of the vitality of criticism.

Until his death, he collaborated with major art magazines such as View, Village Voice, Artforum, Arts Magazine, Art International and compiled a large portion of his combative and revealing texts on contemporary art into books.

This volume presents the unknown to Greece -aside from sporadic publications- American side of Calas. Published in 1968, it gathers 25 of his most significant essays focusing on the American heirs of Surrealism, the relationship between poetry and image, the Pop Art of the 1960s, the criticism of the time (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.'