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 the canvas. I saw not only my own reflection, but also everything that existed around me in space and time, including all the people reflected on the mirror-like canvas. My self-portrait became a self-portrait of the world.

- What is the concept behind the project Mirror of Eternity?

- The concept at its core is immortality, an idea we have inherited culturally from the ancient Egyptians. Think of the figure of the pharaoh, who represented the whole society of his time: his body was mummified, and his likeness reproduced in gold, a material symbolizing incorruptibility and eternity. The tomb also bears witness to this system of beliefs and rituals. Offerings of food and other goods to the deceased were thought to ensure that they could continue to live in the afterlife, beyond their earthly existence.

The idea of immortality has endured through the centuries: from Roman tombs with golden portraits of imperial figures to Byzantine icons, where the human figure stands out against a gold background, symbolizing a dimension beyond the material world and opening onto the light of infinity.

Today, new technologies and artificial intelligence are making this aspiration tangible and accessible to everyone. It is no longer limited to pharaohs, emperors or Jesus Christ, whose images have survived and endured through the centuries. Potentially, it can include each of us, because anyone’s image can be technologically inserted into the trinamic formula of creation.

This formula is represented by three circles. When one person’s image is placed in one of the two outer circles and another person’s image in the opposite circle, the central space becomes the site of their connection and generates the image of a third figure that did not previously exist.

The process recalls biological procreation, through which two individuals give rise to a new person, who looks different from both while retaining some of their features.

If I leave my image in the technological system of Mirror of Eternity, it can combine with the image of anyone else who enters their own likeness into it. Each new connection can generate another figure, which can then interact with other images, creating a potentially endless chain.

An image, therefore, can continue to exist and generate new presences even after the person has physically passed away. This is where the idea of an eternity made possible by technology takes shape: it is like a virtually transferred DNA, gradually formed within human society.

- What does it mean to you to make the viewer an integral part of the artwork?

- When I saw that viewers were becoming an integral part of the Mirror Painting, I realized that I, too, was entering directly into a shared thought. Everyone who looks at the Mirror Painting shares the work because they become part of it through their own image. They cannot avoid their physical presence in front of it.

The Mirror Painting connects everyone’s thoughts. Thought then leads to practical activities that bring together all the people standing before the mirror: economics, politics, religion and every other sphere of social life.

- How do you explore the concepts of memory and presence through this project?

- To create a Mirror Painting, I fix the image of a person or an object onto its surface—something that might appear in the mirror for only an instant. What we see in a mirror has no memory, because it consumes the present anew at every moment. The image of the present does not remain in the Mirror Painting, because every subsequent image is different.

But by fixing an image that would otherwise disappear from the mirror, I allow it to remain. It becomes the image of a moment that no longer changes and survives alongside all the images that continue to change in the mirror. It is the memory of an instant that remains forever, together with the present and the future. In this way, through the Mirror Painting and the image fixed on its surface, I give the mirror memory.

- What does it mean to you to engage in a dialogue with Azerbaijani audiences and present your work as part of Art Weekend 2026 in Baku, a city that brings together its historical and contemporary identities?

- Through art, my work connects Baku with every other place in the world, because the human, artistic-intellectual and practical principle behind the Mirror Painting is not limited to any particular place; it is universal.

The change we can bring to Baku through art and culture is therefore the same change we can spread throughout the rest of the world. All the differences within global society can be brought, through the trinamic formula of creation, into a process of generating shared understanding—an understanding that can be embraced around the world.

Source: azertag.az