Looking at Staring: Nico Vasilakis' Collected Staring.
Letters Arrange Themselves - It's Never a Word First. 2016 Collected Staring . 2026. Digitally processed text. "Words are the source of misunderstandings." — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's compelling suggestion that language can limit communication by distorting or impeding understanding between writer and reader offers a useful starting point for considering the visual poetry of Nico Vassilakis. If we imagine language as a source of misunderstandings, then Vassilakis' 2026 book, Collected Staring , might be read as a reflection on the very nature of literature's generative power. In this context, his decoupling of letters from words becomes a powerful liberative gesture, freeing both the reader/viewer and language itself from the constraints of conventional meaning. A Conversation with Language? While Vassilakis' diverse ruminations on poetics and language are certainly worthy of attention here (...