Agostino Arrivabene (born in 1967) is a visionary yet secluded Italian contemporary artist who continues to produce outstanding surrealist works from his 17th-century house located just outside Milan. His masterful paintings operate in a realm that has no time, boundaries, or laws of physics, creating a sort of ‘room of curiosities’ that gives the viewer a taste of bizarre and extraordinary foreign worlds.
Using his processes of alchemy, Arrivabene has transformed and reinterpreted classical, biblical and allegorical themes into a contemporary viewpoint. The new paintings draw from mythological stories and depict a transformative process in which inner suffering evolves into a desire for healing through a dream or divine intervention.
Arrivabene’s masterful paintings in turn can stop time and create suspended intense moments outside quotidian time. Arrivabene has written of his work as forming a wunderkammer or a “room of curiosities,” such as those created to display the trophies brought back by adventurers returning from foreign expeditions. This attention to the minutiae of his craft has resulted in Arrivabene’s paintings embodying a process of alchemical transformation, in which the physical matter of painting itself is transmuted into extraordinary light-filled visions.
Through the years of self-taught training, the artist not only uses a mathematical proportion of the Golden Ration in his works but also rediscovers traditional painting techniques and makes many of his works with artisan preparation of colors.
Arrivabene’s typical artistic expression is that he frequently works with light in depicting characters, human faces, nature and living or inanimate objects.
Arrivabene was able to observe reality from a peripheral view, constructing a language made of inscrutable representations and messages coded within literature, which lead to a hierarchy of deeper interpretative values. He says:
“I believe that history is a babel of knowing that is enclosed by human memory like a Borges-esque library. Everything that precedes us is like a cache of layered wisdom that nourishes new, still unexplored veins. The history of art has been able to sharpen the gaze and the search for the ideals of beauty, of harmony, and the mystery linked to these values. Art has become like a religion, and in these most recent years, artists have come to understand that we are like shamans, the perfect link between man and the imperishable, since before this period, art depicted religion, but now art is itself a religion.”
[from:www.dailyartmagazine.com/agos...]
Music: Tom Day "Hidden Landscape"
First video: • Agostino Arrivabene