Vesperbildt: The hermetic art of maestro Agostino Arrivabene                            

The excavation work of my mind into my dark inner world is comparable to the journey of Persephone in Hades, or equally Orpheus’ journey into the underworld. They are travel rituals, Orphic or Eleusinian in their urgent desire to steal from the dark world flashes of truth, the glimpses of which are the keys to a parallel realm that must reveal the interior world through an accumulation of images or a babel of languages, the very mystery, just as eagerly sought by ancient civilisations…. My dream is to steal the royal crowns of Persephone and Hades, to bring them to men back on earth to help them understand the centrifugal mystery of life in regards to death, and death that gives rise to life. It is one of my greatest desires to give to the world such royal emblems; to deprive the ancient gods of their symbolic power.

Agostino Arrivabene

The great celestial dawn, the primeval transfiguration and mutilation of the psyche, the mythology which germinates incessantly, the alchemically claire-obscure of an ‘old master’ exiled in the contemporary, a theme that amalgamates crucifixion, plague, Pieta, the daemonic  Eros,  écorché of the spirit, the most obscure shadows of Thanatos and the  beauty the oculus is unaware of, this is with lack of vanity, the sum of substance in Agostino Arrivabene’s Vesperbildt. The exhibition was hosted at Milan, Galleria Giovanni Bonelli and it was curated by Pietro C Marani ( May 23rd – July 26th 2014).

Arrivabene has been complimented as lysergic, ecstatic and an Elysian, and he triumphs indeed as such in Vesperbildt; the artist flows pictorially into a continuum of tenebrous cognisance, into the passage of myth, perhaps one darker and more hallucinating than before. Arrivabene succeeds to encapsulate and sublimate in his work, the terror emanated from the spirit and the body of man. Arrivabene’s Verpers is an oceanic collection in which the artistic hermeneutics acquires great depths and interpretations. It reaches the theme of Pieta, the pulvis Christi, the Christ in the heights of his death’s sleep, emaciated, summoned for the final initiation in the lap of the eternal Virgin.

The Vesper also refers subtly to a melancholic contemplation of the evening, and therefore the obscure of Arrivabene’s chromatic (multiple layers of oil and precious pigments, blood and organic materials which create a dream like shadowing effect) comes to be in a true sense, a reflection of his own mysterious internal esoteric journey.  

For the 14^th century Germans, Vesper meant the image of the Virgin, the sunset of the day, and the end of Christ’s earthly life; it was much later in Renaissance that this aesthetic symbolism vegetated into a new imaginative motif, the Pieta. In his exhibition, Arrivabene accompanied, with his imaginary and his incredible pulsating shapes of artistry, the evening vespers of the Book of Hours, ‘the passion cycle’ or the horae in Latin. In a sense, Arrivabene’s paintings are iconographic towards narrative; as an erudite, the artist cultivates the historicity of his subject beyond the symbolic realm.

 In 1330, Germany was part of the Roman Empire, and Vesperbildt was fashioned in the Middle Rhine region of Germany, where famine, war and plague, the Black Plague, was then the infernal referential reality. Thus the obsessional and traumatic motifs of death and decay are released in Arrivabene’s grand opus. The work entitled ’Monatto dai muti campanelli’ (Monatto with Soundless Bells – or ‘corpse carrier’, the person who removed corpses during a plague) appears as an icon of crepuscular meditation, where the character resides at the threshold between shadow and light, between death and resurrection. The extraordinary plants and flowers growing directly out of the flesh of the body’s upper back and shoulders announce the time of regeneration before the heat and pain of the dying flesh. In his approach, Arrivabene metaphorically conveys the salvic motif as reflection of his own artistic messianic desire to fulfil his personal transfiguration and also a compassionate attention towards what is frail and mortal in the world.

Arrivabene employs Ovid’ character Cyparissus, in which the mourning victim of the plague is transfigured into a vegetal creature. The ‘monatto’ is lamenting an incessant, yet secret mourn. Two mutant, dilated figures, nightmare-like mourners, inspired by the visionary Bernhard Siegfried Albinus, accomplish the retinue as the second element of the triptych. Another leitmotif of Arrivabene, is that of painting the arcane realm of the dead, profoundly evoked in his painting of Orpheus ‘the inconsolable’ as Pavese names him, endeavouring to retrieve his beloved from the infernal Netherland. The woman’s fragmented hand and her figure encapsulated in a mystical ‘Magdalenian’ ecstasy such we witness in Caravaggio, here severed from the rest of the body in order to form each a distinct element of the triptych, symbolize the eternal supplication to the providence for expiation.

 The realm of the artist’s luminaries are alike the Saviour taken down from the cross, beaten and vulnerable, or alike the Virgin Mary of the Vesper, distressed and weary. Esoterically the images symbolize the extraordinary mystery of God in human form and the transmutation of the pain, into new structures and imaginary bodies. The pain and the lament, Arrivabene offers us, through the intensity of his devotional images, the intimate monograph of his profound knowledge: skulls, oniric regenerative vegetation as in Arcimboldo’s paintings, golden powders distilled from hydrargyrum (a Latin term translated as mercury, employed within the alchemical theories as the First Matter from which all metals were formed), as in Granet’s opus, a suspension of the world in a floral, organic manner a la Bruegel , albedo and nigredo within his internal visionary athanor, monstrous in appearance such as the iconographic world of Ernst Haeckel.

The gallery offered the artist an essentially special sense of emptiness and white walls resembling a Hellenic pantheon, where the artist revealed himself priestly with astounding technical virtuosity and with a smile of resignation. His uniqueness as artist comes from an assumed sense of exile and mystique and I often wondered during the years I have witnessed his majestic and refined works whether he is endowed with divine qualities, genius or he is just re-inventing the sublime.