di all the figurative painters of the latest generations, from the end of the 70s to today, belonging to different groups, Enzo Cucchi, Wainer Vaccari, Lino Frongia, Stefano Di Stasio, admirable for the exercise and technique often developed on the study of the ancients , the most eccentric, the most original, the more experimental it certainly is Agostino Arrivabene. He likes ambitious painting, he likes executive perfection, but his imagination leads him towards extreme subjects.
Very far from reality, he is certainly the most dreamlike of our painters, and his images are torn and tormented. It is a continuous metamorphosis that multiplies the forms of reality. Drawing and painting are for Arrivabene tools of knowledge that require concentration and continuous application, study and comparisons. The times don’t seem to require it due to the many fictions that had made the face of art unrecognizable, with each metamorphosis.
And here is Augustine seeing him again behind the mask, in the uncovered faces of his beloved painters: Werner Tübke, Lucian Freud, Odd Nerdrum, Antonio López García. These beacons in the night showed him that the road was still there and could be walked with difficulty. And this is his match with painting.
Agostino Arrivabene, “Athena” (1996). The “Thesauros” exhibition is at the Palazzo dei Diamanti in Ferrara, from 16 July to 1 October (photo Agostino Arrivabene Collection).
Then there’s the one with the dream. Much of what Arrivabene tells is only the appearance of reality. Arrivabene’s goal is to increase wonder, elaborating themes and myths of symbolism. In the trials of his early maturity, such as Athena or The Seven Days of Orpheusmyths intersect with nature, with flowers, elaborating images never seen before, in a process of re-elaboration of the myth that has no equal even in the most feverish surrealistic vision.
Arrivabene exaggerates, overflows, dreams. He reincarnates in Parmigianino whose obsessions he repeats: «I reasoned that the creative process that has always characterized my work is esoteric and exotically devoted to astral and magical travel, perhaps alchemical, if we speak of mutation or transmutation from lead to gold». His Parmigianino blends with Moreau, Delvaux touching the paradise of the Pre-Raphaelites. Only an irrepressible imagination can imagine a feathered helmet enlivened by birds and flowers. In the golden shield snakes stir. Others suck milk from nipples or hold pearls in their jaws. Divinity multiplies nature.
Arrivabene practices on the details. Like Athena’s incredible helmet, Orpheus’ harp, created by Mercury for Apollo, is a surprising invention of worked gold and enamel. No musical instrument has ever been so rich. Arrivabene also transforms the myth into the representation of Infernal spouses Hades and Persephone, capable of shining even in the mud of their clothes. On petrified fossil wood spawns The breath of the earth. The blue man is pervaded by a shower of gold, and here he is unleashed with The Golden Flies, putting himself in competition with the great Flemish painters of still life and flowers. The models of Ambrosius Bosschaert and other brilliant florists inspire Arrivabene, who enriches his catalog with a modern Mona Lisa, perhaps a self-portrait: Lucifer which has a black hole instead of a face. They are magical apparitions.
After these exemplary works which culminate in the triptych with The Keeper of Destinies Arrivabene, in going backwards, in understanding his origins, arrives at his current style in 2017 with Sourcethe beginning of a palingenesis which culminates in the Weight of purple of 2015 and his mystical spirituality also makes room in Angel of pouring And Holy bloodoriginal interpretation of theEcce Homo.
In more recent works, starting with Centauromachy, Dream and especially homo novus, Arrivabene is a slave to his ghosts, in the interweaving of damned bodies. Beautiful it is Erotomachia infera with the knot of souls lost for carnal love and, out of the interweaving of the other bodies of damned souls, luminous against the dark, Paolo and Francesca. His is a mystical ascesis, through art, an extreme experience.
Neither The two deaths there is «The incarnation», Arrivabene explains, «of an awareness that I also made mine, or rather the idea that the artist, in order to reach eternity, must pass through the testimony of his failure, since talent must be witness to something wider, and not mere self-aggrandizement.
The very refined tests of this phase, especially the great works, have a strong affinity with the research of Fabrizio Clerici. Nature, the mountains, the skies, the waters are painted with animated coldness. The lighthouse is Piero di Cosimo with its sumptuous Portrait of Simonetta Vespucci but, in the landscapes that open up in Arrivabene’s paintings, you can also imagine the Death of Procris, a masterpiece by Piero di Cosimo which, for Arrivabene, is a challenge. We need to go further, and he did. Even beyond himself.
It opens in Ferrara on July 16th Thesaurus an anthological exhibition dedicated to Agostino Arrivabene. Curated by Vittorio Sgarbi, the exhibition brings together forty works including paintings, drawings and mirabilia objects created from 1985 to today.
INFO: Ferrara, Palazzo Diamanti, from 16 July to 1 October.
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