Michelangelo Pistoletto at Fly to Baku Art Weekend: Mirror of Eternity and New Art - INTERVIEW

Baku, October 29, AZERTAC Italian artist Michelangelo Pistoletto’s project will be presented at the Heydar Aliyev Center as part of the “Fly to Baku. Art Weekend. Sense the Future NOW” festival. Visitors will have the opportunity to explore his work entitled Mirror of Eternity. Over more than six decades of artistic practice, Pistoletto has used mirrors to make viewers an integral part of his artworks. In his Mirror Paintings series, created in the 1960s, the viewer’s reflection becomes part of the work, making each encounter unique. With Mirror of Eternity, the artist continues this concept by drawing on the possibilities of the digital age. The project uses artificial intelligence to merge human portraits and generate entirely new faces that have never existed before.

In an interview with AZERTAC, Pistoletto discussed the concept behind the work to be presented in Baku and the role of digital technologies in art. - Why does the mirror motif occupy such an important place in your artistic practice? - Modern art led artists to create their own marks as expressions of their inner feelings and being. In the 1950s, I did not want to create an independent mark of my own that would exclude me from society. I wanted to recognize myself not through a mark made by my own will, but through the reasons for my existence and for being in the world. I exist, and I cannot deny it, because I see myself in the mirror. The mirror is a direct representation of my presence. It is not an arbitrary statement I make about myself. So, instead of painting the figure I see in the mirror to create a self-portrait, I decided to paint the mirror itself. I created a mirror on the surface of the canvas: a black ground, covered in many layers of varnish, brought light and image into the virtual depth of…