AGOSTI NOARRIVABENE INTERVIEW BY DAVID MOLESKY PORTRAIT BY ALICE NEMNT'NOYA
lN THE GRAND FOYER OF VIENNAS KUNSTHISTORISCHES MUSEUM, with its marbte ftoors
and ornate details, l'm pleasantly distracted by a man speaking ltalian and captivating a small crowd. His disheveled curly locks bounce and sway as he passionately gestures, hands jangling with bangles, bracelets, and large rings. Entering a room of Flemish still-life paintings, spy him again, enthusiastically riffing to his coterie as he thrusts his face up to the canvas and then quickly back to observe the effects of distance. I
I stop him a moment to ask if he is exhibiting in Odd Nerdrum's Kitsch Biennale 2O08, which had opened the night before. As he confirmed and introduced himself as Agostino Arrivabene, I realized that lwas meeting the author of my favorite painting in the show. Growing up in the stratified terrain of Lombardy, a region of ltaly populated for centuries by a variety of ethnic groups and cultures, Agostino attributes his heritage to ancient Egyptian and Viking influences. Born and raised in the small medieval village of Rivolta dAdda, Agostino shaped himself as a young artist in an atmosphere rich with beauty and sorrow. His fascination for morbid detail plays itself out in his extreme attention to the transformative processes of mixing, boiling, and concentrating his materials.
him a sense of grace and poetic sensibility through which to view the world. My father sacrificed a wing of the house to serve as my private studio, and here I laid the fouhdation for my future works, guiding myself with the help of books and museums. Even the academy of fine arts could not fill my hunger for knowledge, so I created a sort ofvirtual workshop where I compared my technical experiments with those of the past. These were years of meticulous study; every detail and material I discovered had to be worked on, distilled, perfected and prepared with my own hands.
Where do you live now and how is your studio set up? I love solitary country life in my 18th century farmhouse. The
house is divided into three levels where every floor contains a space for work or meditation. ln the attic, I have made
With the use of both robotic and human translators, I was able to connect with Agostino in the ltalian countryside to ask a few questions as he prepared for his solo show,
Verperbild, opening May 22nd at Gallerie Giovanni Bonelli in Milan, ltaly.
Dovid Molesky: How did growing up in rural ltaly influence your training as an artist? Agostino Arrivobene: I have many, though nebulous, memories of my childhood due to trauma. When I was four years old, my destiny was marked when my mother lost her life, suddenly leaving me alone with a newborn brother and fragile father. Thereafter, it was a continuous roam between the homes of various relatives, till later a paternal aunt made things more stable. I then began a devoted search for the ideal figure of a mother that, from year to year, grew in me like an ancient simulacrum. I have dedicated several works of my early years to this totemic image so that I may strip its mystery and drain this charge of primordial force that was consuming my brain and flattening my emotions. I received my first encouragement in art through my father who took me to confront directly all the great ltalian masters. ln Florence, I first encountered Leonardo Da Vinci and, for many years afterward, he was my master. I distilled from
the yellow atelier. This is where I keep my library and I do preparatory drawings in the soft light. On the next level down is the blue atelier, a north-facing studio where I do the fine finishing work on paintings. Here the crisp light pours in over a vastness of deserted fields and allows me to observe hues with greater subtlety. On the ground floor is the scarlet atelier, where I spend the most time and where most of my paintings are initiated. Here I also keep a few inspirational books. ln one room, where I store my drawings, I have made a kind of temple dedicated to my 1996 circular painting of Orpheus.
A large spiral staircase, inspired by Gustave Moreau's Paris, ascends to my personal Wunderkammer, where I house my collection ofcurious objects and sculptures. You have cited the importance of your visits to Greece. How have your experiences and research there contributed
to your work? Patmos is the island where I have nourished my nostalgia and homesickness for the time when human beings met the gods. This is the great hidden mystery that haunts me, the link of some mysterious visitors that constituted the foundation of our myths, from Sumer.ian and Egyptian to the biblical tales, and through the Minoan civilization to the more recent Greek myths.
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Crete was also a necessary journey, following my interest in rituals dedicated to Dionysus. ln order til reach states of agitation and inebriation, the initiated would ingest ambrosia, the nectar of the gods: pure honey mixed with rainwater collected during the full-moon night of a particular month ofthe year and then fermented in a bag made of a
sacrificed ox skin. The baffling detail is that the ox, sacrificed in the dark caverns on the southwest side of the island, had to be devoured by bee swarms that would build their honeycomb inside its carcass from which the sacred honey for the ambrosia was eventually extracted. How have you used the mythology of the abduction of the goddess of spring, Persephone, and her submersion into the underworld as an allegory in your paintings? Life and death is a mystery that involves each one of us. ln my case, having empathy for the figure of Persephone helped me defeat death as a haunting specter in my life. ln this way, the myth can be used to heal and sublimate the fear and anguish of a difficult path.
ambiguously helpful and hindering since my childhood. oDove Conto Infernole (lnfernol Song) Atlan linen
A friendly cemetery caretaker near my home nurtured my curiosity, inviting me to assist in the exhumation and observation of bodies so I could study flesh transformation and putrefaction.
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Do you do a lot of preliminary work, or just jump into
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My process of constructing images changes depending on I usually proceed following sudden impressions, sometimes triggered by things found on the web or in a magazine. I have built a database/memory notebook where
aspects was, because of my personal life experiences,
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a composition?
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collect images. Here inside this greenhouse, a mosaic of ideas cross-pollinate to nurture and bloom my incomplete works. lf a subject strikes and haunts me, I am destined to repeat and inflect upon it with severalversions and with various
experimental techniques. I start developing a concept with sketches on paper until I can translate it into a Iarger size. ln reverse, some images are like lightning flashes, splinters
My fascination with death and all its macabre and symbolic
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inevitably emerging without studies, starting directly on the canvas, I begin with large masses of color, slowly finishing
with meticulous and methodical labor. My brush gestures are initially like violent sword strokes dripping with paint and ending like the caress of a lover. Other paintings are subjected to elaborate virtual processes that start from suggestions of anamorphic refractions, distorting and stretching images printed on elastic or soft surfaces, activating a work of collage and cut-outs, disassembling and reassembling a painting in a new interpretation. One thing that intrigues me is the continued search of new materials and their chemical and physical reactions. I like
to imagine my paintings as a Leviathan assembled with complex structures and scaffoldings made of bones, flesh and skin, that I love to torture, with scars I can eventually heal and soothe to activ'ate a golden and unseen new beauty. The application of gold in your paintings is unusual. How did you first develop this technique and arrive at this process? I love the medieval paintings housed in the Uffizi. I am especially struck by the contrast of blue and rose robes with the pure gold sky in Giotto's Modonno d'Ognissanti. I am also deeply moved by the great mystic works of Fra Angelico, who renders the idea of perfection through color
and sign. ln my most recent trip to Greece, visits to the icons collection in the Patmos Monastery and the Byzantine Museum of
Athens definitively confirmed my fascination for the use of gold, specifically the way time modifies the colors and gold films. Gold became that necessary abstract space to "catch the light of a divine presence in a praeternatural reverberation" to quote Aldous Huxley. My personal survey dedicated to Theophanies needed an appropriate material to reflect the transcendental idea ofthe apparition of God. Thus, gold represents the divine breath, the Hebrew Ruoh or Greek Chorls, the grace that the humans receive from gods that is the Christian Holy Spirit. ln many of your recent paintings, the figures have light entering their heads or they are being engulfed in what is referred to as a bacterial cloud. To me, they look more like cone jellyfish. What are these elements representing? The rays of light are like ascending and descending trajectories, bridges of communication between the ideal and real worlds, a revelation of God or gods that infuse the mystai (initiated). The bacterial clouds represent my inner highest confusion and disease, my incapability to freeze life in its total perfection and unaltered youth. ln fact, my Self Portroit with Bacterial C/oud dialogues with my other Self Portroit with Fireflies in which the fireflies are a more pleasing, romantic and dreamy elemerlt as opposed to the fear of sickness and death represented by the mass of bacteria that makes human beings fragile and fallible. This diptych is an homage to the ancient baroque vanitas, a memory of the classical theme of artist confrontation with his
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What kinds of imagery are you currently brewing in the studio and what kinds of works can we expect to see in the future? I'm now working on a series of large paintings that will be exhibited in a group show called Opera ot the Museum of Conton in China next winter. l'm also working on some drawings for a new precious British edition of Ovid's
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Metomorphosis. But my paramount interest is now directed to the works of Giordano Bruno and his project of a wheel of memory.fhis mysterious machinery, never realized, has an impressive bulk with a diameter of 30 meters. lt's made of several concentric circles decorated with images and icons, which can array themselves into an infinite variety of patterns to exercise and improve memory.
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