Archetypes & Ecologies – Agostino Arrivabene

May 29, 2011 Daniel Mirante in Articles, Interviews 8 Comments Tags: fantastic realism, italy, oil painting, Old master

Augustino Arrivabene (born Rivolta d’Adda, Italy, June 11, 1967) is a visionary painter who expresses a radical reworking of mythologies with “iconography moving between desire and hallucination, between sensuosity and intellectual poison”

Sogno by Agostino Arrivabene

Arrivabene paints with jewel-like accuracy and abundance of details, betraying a profound study of classical techniques, rare and more precious in an era of mass-manufacture, and a contemporary art scene that confuses dangerously the espressive with the lazy lack of technical craft and talentlessness.

Nuotatore by Agostino Arrivabene

After graduating in 1991 at the Brera Art Academy in 1991, he focused on painting, drawing and etching, Arrivabene was drawn to learn from the wellsprings of spiritual and technical knowledge found in the classical Masters such as Leonardo Da Vinci, Dürer and van Eyck, making master study drawings and paintings from their works in Europe’s museums. This research involved a study in almost-forgotten painting techniques (such as egg tempera and oil glaze, mischtechnik), and to prepare paint according to traditional methods (lapis lazuli, cinnabar, pure indigo, madder, bistre, dragon’s blood, etc).

The references to the history of the art in the works of Arrivabene are multiple, with Leonardo Da Vinci to the esoteric symbolism of Jean Delville composing a continuous lineage, of which Arrivabene can be considered an heir. In an art scene obsessed with the mislead concept of ‘novelty’, a break with the past, which is simply a founding myth of modernism, Arrivabene has sometimes been accused of lifting directly from old masters and some contemporary painters who also honour the past (Alberto Agazzani writes: “The Rembrandt ostentatious in key nerdruniana [...] [...] on the edge of plagiarism”). But all art stands on the shoulder of giants. There should be no objection to art that pays homage and learns from masters of the craft.

Capro-nero by Agostino Arrivabene

In speaking of this subject, Arrivabene informs to “…think of the young Raphael and his master Perugino, (it) is difficult to distinguish the phase of the master Perugino Urbino by Perugino’s own hand. Leonardo Da Vinci in Verrocchio’s workshop is very similar to the young Botticelli and Lorenzo di Credi, who emulate the same Verrocchio. So it is normal for an artist to go looking for symbolic guides, technical or poetic in its immediate past or artistic figures of his time, and then going in more independent and personal.”

Agostino Arrivabene

The painting of Arrivabene are steeped in the archetypal wisdoms and depths found in classical and ancient mythology. Painting is a precision instrument in order to explore that which is generally not cognizable through the methods of science and rationality. Through imaginative narrations they carry light in the deeper layers of the conscience, into mysterious zones of the mind in which the archetypal symbolic images reside.

Self-portrait with bacterial cloud. Agostino Arrivabene

Self-portrait with bacterial cloud - detail

In his paintings the references to the water are multiple, an element symbolically linked to the unconscious psyche. His figures often seem to be immersed in a mysterious rich sea of corals and bacterial colonies, in which the bodies relinquish their customary material consistency in order to melt in evanescence and continuous metamorphosis into animals and vegetables.

Copia di rea et ade majestatis copia.

A superficial view of his works can place such production in the surrealist vien, or the fashion of the POP surrealism of California. But a more careful appraisal of the productions of Arrivabene reveals an intellectual structure from traditional esoterisim and classic mythology, which differentiates it from the uncontrolled liberation of the unconscious in Surrealism, or the deconstruction and re-amalgam of mass-consumer culture seen in Pop surrealism.

Le visioni de St Sebastiano

Le visioni de St Sebastiano detail

An art, that of Arrivabene, alienates itself from the contemporary world in order to undertake the pilgrimage into the mystery. “I prefer to plumb my roots, my original genetic code… Mine is a search of archetypal values, of answers to the questions of life, a way to redeem what is now decidedly superficial.”

More of Augstino Arrivabene’s work can be seen at www.agostinoarrivabene.it

See other articles on Arrivabene online at:
http://artitude.eu
http://nuovo-tekne.nohup.it