Interview: Mikaya Petros
Luca Curci talks with Mikaya Petros during Venice International Art Fair 2021, at Palazzo Albrizzi-Capello.

Mikaya Petros was born in Milan, class of 1964, daughter of the surrealist painter Petros. She trained in his father’s atelier where he made four-handed photographic collages, pictorial and material works. The meeting in the 70s with Andy Warhol was incisive. It is in the production, post-production and computer graphics house of her maternal uncle, that the artist has worked since she was a girl in the creation of digital and video contributions. “Painting is for me like singing under the shower on a sunshine day,” she says. Her Art investigates, through digital experimentation, the surrealist matrix, giving life to conceptual and formal research with a breath that deepens the boundary between Reality, Time and Symbolism. The subjects of her works, created through a digital photographic language, live in a contemporary dream dimension. In her creative process, Symbolism and Time are investigated, broken down and reassembled in an innovative vision. It’s a mirror and parallel reflection of a world yet to be deciphered. Her works are exhibited in Arte & Virtus, at Expo Fiera di Milano, at the Trieste Biennal, at the Michelangelo Prize Rome Expo and at Archivio Mantova Museum, the Arte Laguna World, at the Dante Alighieri Prize Borghese Palace in Florence and London.

Luca Curci – What are you currently working on?
Mikaya Petros – I am currently working on a project that I have been thinking about for a long time that I have called Vitapicta, from the Latin Vita Dipinta (Painted Life). I am collaborating with some musical artists such as the musician and composer Younee, the soprano Silvia Colombini and the French singer Tiphanie Doucet, whom I have asked to compose music inspired by some of my recent works that will be presented at the Dante Alighieri Prize, at Palazzo Borghese in Florence and in London, as well as at the Michelangelo Prize that will be held in June in Piazza di Spagna. In parallel to the Venice International Art Fair I have one of my works at the Biennale di Trieste BID and in June I will be present with two of my works at the Art Walk in New York.

LC – What’s your background? What is the experience that has influenced your work the most?
MP – I was born a child of Art, my father was the abstract surrealist painter Petros, of the legendary stable of Alexander Jolas, a Greek gallery owner who had already discovered Matta, Lam and Dali. I grew up in the midst of artists who have created our modern and contemporary art, among them memorable the meeting I had with my father and Andy Warhol shortly before his death in Milan at the Palazzo Delle Stelline for his exhibition The Last Supper where my father had designed the manifesto. Certainly decisive for my formation were the years I spent in my father’s atelier working four-handedly on pictorial and material works.

LC – What is your creative process like?
MP – My creative process follows, almost as if under dictation, an urgent need to tell, through my artistic language, my artistic vision of things. So I observe my time and develop new spaces of figuration and investigation.

LC – Are your artworks focused on a specific theme?
MP – My works focus on reading, on several levels, of the contingent reality and a parallel dimension, sometimes metaphysical, more frequently surreal figurative-abstract.

LC – How is being an artist nowadays?
MP – Being an artist today means breathing this magnificent technological era, I personally love immensely to photograph what inspires me and make digital sketches. I like to experiment but certainly, oil painting on canvas draws my DNA.

LC – We were attracted by your last artistic production, has the artwork presented been created for the festival or as a part of preexisting works?
MP – The work I presented at the Venice International Art Fair, is part of a series of figurative-abstract paintings that investigate human individuality and the clones of our near future. I am attracted to the themes of cyberspace and its effects on human beings and our way of being, seeing things, acting and living.

LC – Do you agree with our vision of art and what do you think about the theme of the festival?
MP – I found interesting the theme of the Festival and I decided to join the initiative because I felt it very much in my heart.

LC – Did you enjoy cooperating with us?
MP – I appreciated this collaboration with you who brought me back to the city of my paternal family of Venetian-Byzantine-Greek origin. A Ruzzini was also Doge of Venice.