Tag: agostino arrivabene

Agostino Arrivabene

Agostino Arrivabene, “Martyrium (San Sebastiano)”, 2011, Oil on Linen, 101.6 x 91.4 cm, Private Collection

Arrivabene’s masterful paintings have the ability to stop time and create suspended intense moments outside quotidian time. Arrivabene has written of his work as forming a “wunderkammern” or “a room of curiosities,” such as those created to display the trophies brought back by adventurers returning from foreign expeditions. This points to the painter, Arrivabene, as an explorer  returning with  bizarre and extraordinary fragments or treasures  from  strange, new visionary worlds.

Agostino Arrivabene

Agostino Arrivabene, “Giorgio e Cief”, 2007, Oil on Wood, Dimensions Unknown, Private Collection

Born in 1967, Agostino Arrivabene is a visionary artist who paints surrealistic works. Influenced by Symbolist artists such as Gustave Moreau and Norwegian figurative painter Odd Nerdrum, his work features landscapes, portraits, and allegorical paintings often with apocalyptic themes. Arrivabene currently lives and works in a rural farmhouse In Gradella di Pandino, near Milan, Italy.

Arrivabene uses antique painting techniques to create a foundation from which metamorphic figures emerge in moments of creation. The time-consuming labor of grinding pigments and layering paints is evident in the complex, heavily textural works. In the late part of 2018, he began a new series of paintings using natural canvases , conglomerate mineral and woodland findings, to add natural textures to his surreal works.

Agostino Arrivabene

Paintings by Agostino Arrivabene

After his initial training at art school where Arrivabene says he learnt next to nothing, Agostino Arrivabene toured throughout Europe and studied the Old Master paintings. He researched how to grind his own pigments: lapis lazuli, indigo, cinnabar and madder, dragon’s blood, orpiment and bistre. Arrivabene also studied the almost-forgotten techniques of painting like mischtechnik, used by such artists as Albrech Dürer and Matthias Grünewald.

In the mischtechnik process, egg tempera is used in combination with oil-based paints to create translucent layers that, when laid over each other, refract light through the painting thus creating a sense of luminosity. Arrivabene’s attention to the minutiae of his craft has resulted in paintings actually embodying a process of alchemical  transformation. The physical matter of painting itself, the lead, the ground pigment, the egg, and the oil, is transmuted through the agency of his craft into extraordinary light-filled visions.

Another notable aspect of Arrivabene’s work is its dense saturation with painting’s history; his work resonates with a lineage of past visionary artists. Within Arrivabene’s work, we see glimpses of Francisco Goya, Leonardo da Vinci, Gustave Moreau, William Blake, Odd Nerdrum, and in some of his pencil drawings, Mervyn Peake. Despite this sense of continuity and connection with past masters, Arrivabene’s work remains fresh, contemporary, and distinctly his own.