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 in a sunshine day” she says.
Her Art investigates, through digital experimentation, the surrealist matrix, giving life to a 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 creativity 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 Archivio Mantova Museum, at the Arte Laguna World, at the Dante Alighieri Prize Borghese Palace in Floence and at Dante Academy in London. Her artwork „Clonable Identity“ is at Ca‘ Pesaro Museum in Venice, Como Landscape Museum, Korea’s Cica Museum, Dover NH’s Museum, Bordeux’s Maritime Museum France, Serpone Foundation in Rome, Syros Museum in Greece and Moca Museum in Nigeria Permanent Collection.
Instagram @mikayapetros
Archivio Art Magazine of December 2020 and January 2021
Statement Mikaya Petros 2023 _ I am a daughter of Art, my father was the surrealist painter Petros. With him I met personalities such as Andy Warhol for whom he designed the poster for the Last Supper’s Exhibition and many other leading artists who have marked our time. I have an abstract matrix and I love to tell the real, virtual and metaphysical world. I draw on the canvas an intermediate space between the before and after, between the saying and the magical silence with long oblique lines, a legacy of my passion for photography. I shape the color as an amplifier of our photoreceptors on a vital and pulsating artistic wavelength. My characters move in a parallel dimension between mutating forms that narrate the Invisible. The main elements of my work are based on experimentation. Oil paint is in my DNA, but I love testing new materials in a sort of spatial extension of my pictorial discourse. I use cold tones of blue, green and white to show my interiority. I am fascinated by the digital age and its variations, sometimes I represent the human cloning of our near future, as in the work entitled Clonable Identity permanently in the Cà Pesaro Museum in Venice, which I thank, having been one of the first institutional poles to believe In me. In the last two years my works have been included in the permanent collections of ten museums around the world. "Under the big oak the little oak always grows" they told me as a child and today I think it's just like that. Long live the Art. Meeting Mikaya Petros is like being in a crossroads between the far North and the deep South. It will be her Viking-Byzantine ancestry, which develop into a slender and Nordic figure, it will be the Hellenic matrix. Her Art, many oils on canvas or mixed techniques, but also works on paper, photographs or multimedia works, have the advantage of involving, from the first glance for that innovative and not obvious way of distilling concentrates of vibrations. Thus the decisive brushstrokes, never flat, but fleshy and vivid, which at times seem to be able to leave the canvas in total autonomy, lead the viewer to the painting to enter, through the main door, an unexplored and new world. Mikaya knows how to investigate her time and represent it by transfiguring it with impact into another dimension. They are works of small and large dimensions, where the material seems to dematerialize and recompose itself, where the lines break and resume in unusual and intriguing paths. Observing her figures with indecipherable and iridescent faces, in the center of the canvas, we are magnetized by an energy, which reveals itself to our soul but cannot be fully decipherable. A slightly curved back, giant mouths whose lips barely parted, weigh on a slightly reclined nape. It is the visual story of words that have never been spoken, of existential auras, capable of bouncing in the mind like clumsy over thoughts, finally evaporating in the ether, similar to memories just mentioned and already destined for oblivion.
Her conscious and polychromatic painting describes our digital_ robotic era. It is in this futuristic place that the individual, infinitely replicable in virtual clones, succumbs to the technology he has created himself. The artist knows how to tell with emblematic tones all the anguish and joys of our time, spurring us to reflect on ourselves and on the destinies of this humanity. From abstract forms figurative elements emerge, at the center of which it seems to be able to accompany us by the hand. Her are arguments that describe the everyday, transposing it into a parallel dimension, not purely of pictorial representation, but exquisitely symbolic and surreal. Time and space seem to expand in a reference between an inside and an outside, between before and after, between satiety of thought and hunger for idleness. It is no coincidence that one of the most important and fascinating Italian museums, such as the Cà Pesaro in Venice, wanted to pay homage to the inspiration of this Italian painter, inserting it in her permanent collection.
