Artist Biography

Mikaya Petros alias Michela Papavassiliou was born in Milan, class of 1964, daughter of the surrealist painter Petros. She trained in her father’s atelier where he made four-handed photographic collages, pictorial and material works. The encounters from the 70s with Andy Warhol, Michele Cascella, Alecos Fassianos, Mimmo Rotella and many characters who have marked our time have been incisive for her training. “My DNA is surrealist in a abstract figurative soul,” she says. The subjects of her works breathe a dream dimension that absorbs all the contradictions and peculiarities of our era. Symbolism and Time are investigated, broken down and recomposed in a metamorphic vision, a reflection of a mirrored and parallel world. Her recent works at Expo Fiera di Milano 2020, at the Museo Archivio di Mantova 2021, at the Biennale Donna in Trieste, at the Arsenale in Venice. Laguna World, at the Michelangelo Expo Rome 2021 International Award at the Dante Alighieri Award at Palazzo Borghese in Florence and at the Dante Society in London. Five of her works has been included in the Permanent Collection of the Mantova Museum, Landscape Como’s Museum,Ca ‘Pesaro Museum in Venice, and Cica Museu in Corea. Instagram @mikayapetros #mikayart www.artelaguna.world/artist/petros-papavassiliou-mikaya-michela/ been my way of living, breathing and looking at things. My father, a surrealist painter, has certainly been my Master of Art and Life. I remember when I was just 4 years old, he would lift me in his arms to read the landscape pictorially with me. “There you put the whites, in those shadows you put the colors all together, because black does not exist being the mix of colors that inhabit your brush.” This is a necessary premise to understand my painting and my propensity to stop on paper all the things that I have an urgent and unstoppable need to say, almost under dictation, almost as if I did not have the time to communicate everything. My relationship with paper also has deep roots because Petros had a printing press where some of the catalogs and posters that have made the history of part of our contemporary art were printed. Magritte, de Chirico, Andy Warhol, but the list could be long. With the remnants of printing, colored papers, long strips of scraps, I built the foundations of my artistic world, made not only of shapes, ideas, projects, but also and above all of spaces, lights and smells. The scent of raw paper, the consistency of Japanese paper against the light or in my hands, are inspirations that were difficult for me to decipher then, but certainly very clear today. Mikaya Petros is considered a contemporary abstract figurative painting.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.