Agostino Arrivabene, that painting full of magical will

Tomorrow, Monday 7 September, the exhibition of Agostino Arrivabene, a brilliant artist and visionary standard bearer of contemporary Italian figurative art, opens in Milan. Here we try to highlight the very personal "oniricon": a bridge towards a surreality that does not deny the world of phenomena, but integrates the visible with the ecstatic power of the invisible.


di Luke Siniscalco
originally published on IlGiornaleOFF
cover: Agostino Arrivabene, โ€œLuciferoโ€, 1997

Precise signs, Renaissance technique, plasticity of exquisite workmanship, elegance of the line intersect with elusive and magmatic epiphanies, swirling metamorphoses, transitions of the elementary.

It is this complexity, bristling on the threshold of the unspeakable, to pervade the works of Agostino Arrivabene, to seal his aesthetic jewels in which opposites are magnetically attracted rather than distinct.

The art of Arrivabene is not suited to the Two, the split that analytically distinguishes and separates forms, rather a courageous, incessant, at times obsessive tension towards the One, which is effusively given in the infinity of images.

This is why the Lombard artist's canvases are an example of radicalย iconophilia: is thelove for the image, in its mediating dimension, as the chosen way between the different levels of reality, to give the imprimatur to the artist's creations.

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Agostino Arrivabene, โ€œCrux Mysticaโ€, 2017

And it is this energy that animates the paradox: the ambition to say the infinite in the finite, to signify the beyond in the here and now, to spiritually experience corporeality and eroticism, carnally the deepest motions of the human soul. Thus it is in the excess, in the overflowing of the banks of fullness, that the measure can be seen.

There are numerous references with which the pictorial art ofย Agostino Arrivabeneย dialogues: Leonardo Da Vinci, the Renaissance masters, Dรผrer, Flemish painting, Rembrandt, the Pre-Raphaelites, Gustave Moreau.

All reinterpreted through a very personal "dreamiconโ€: A bridge towards a surreality that does not deny the world of phenomena, but integrates the visible of ecstatic power of the invisible. As Romano Gasparotti explains well, speaking of Magritte:

โ€œThe artistic power of the picture is all placed in the invisible, literally re-veiled by the visible figures of the picture"(The invisible picture, Cronopio, 2015).

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Agostino Arrivabene, โ€œPietasโ€, 2020

The Mystery-Divine-Destiny triadย pervades all Arrivabene's works: the refined forms of his sign lead the viewer to the threshold of the Beyond. Always an approach, never a perennial achievement, it is.

From here, perhaps, derives that sense of the tragic - so strongly Hellenic - that animates his work. In fact, at the bottom of the quotationist and erudite taste, at times baroque, lies an arduous task: preserve beauty (his haggard and ephemeral moments) in artistic creation.

An art, therefore, that challenges Western logocentrism, that world of Socratic clarity in which there is no space for the art event. A mythopoeia, that is, a creation of worlds, in which darkness, evil and horror are shown, suffered and, finally, undressed, surgically, revealing the destiny of the human race and the continuum of reality, its progress between dances and revelations rather than forced juxtapositions.

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Agostino Arrivabene, โ€œRapture (Ganymede)โ€, 2012

It is no coincidence that Arrivabene recently tackled opera, in the role of Director of sets and costumes forย Samson and Dalilaย (Samson and Delilah), directed by Jean-Louis Grinda. The theatrum mundi of his art thus showed itself on the stage, with expressive codes unusual for the work, of strong immediate impact.

A distortion, also in this case, of the common sense by which the public is too often conditioned. As a 2016 painting exemplifies,ย Sacred face: here the union of love between two human bodies is reinterpreted in a mystical key, so much so that, more than two figures that come together, we should speak of a single figure that contains within itself an otherness. Union isย sacred face, realize the sacred, and do it in thehic and nunc, in the time of concrete fullness.

Art cannot therefore be a didactic and purely mimetic description, but rather it is mythical-symbolic expression of the hybridization of forms, is the reality of the imaginary perceptible in sensible forms. Who, then, is the painter - Agostino Arrivabene in this case - if not a man full of magical will?

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Agostino Arrivabene, โ€œSacrum facereโ€, 2016

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