Agostino Arrivabene. L'oniromante

Primo Marella Gallery is proud to welcome the opening of the extraordinary exhibition "L'Oniromante" The Oniromancer) by artist Agostino Arrivabene to its exhibition spaces in Milan. The opening event will be held on 22 February to offer the public an extraordinary experience through the artist's visions.

L'Oniromante follows the recent personal exhibition Thesauros curated by Vittorio Sgarbi, an anthological show in the prestigious spaces of Palazzo dei Diamanti in Ferrara where the artist had already highlighted a literary path in reference to a corpus of works, executed over forty years of his vast production, where clear references were made to the works of great authors of the past such as Dante Alighieri, Etzra Pound, Michelangelo Buonarroti, Ovid and Hesiod; On this dialogue between painting and literature Arrivabene, in collaboration with Primo Marella, has constructed an itinerary in which the visions of dreams open up to a gaze that investigates more mysterious contexts of theurgic evocation, of mystical and visionary elevation in which the theophany of the gods transforms the works on display into true divine simulacra.
"the idea that the sacred passage between life and death is a definitive diaphragm, and as such an oppressive fear, is something that Arrivabene cannot accept, hence his unsuppressible tension towards the transcendent, towards the mystical [...] It is the threshold between light and shadow that Arrivabene continually breaks with the indefatigable force of the migratory bird". *

And it is between these opposites, light, shadow, paradise, hell, that Arrivabene sees in waking and dreaming his journey towards polluted sleeps where the dimension of oneiric visions becomes a prediction, an oracle, a miracle to face reality or to decipher in reality the mystery of an Eternal God with whom to have a dialogue and give substance and meaning to the reality of life.

It is in the black lands, where the vegetations of the dream are processed, that Arrivabene has repeatedly drawn his images, which have arisen through surrealist automatisms or by chance, with informal gestures of painting in his priming or from the oblivion of nights, in sleep, or from the hypnagogic visions arising from the abstract and mineral forms of his fossilised woods present here, painted stones executed from 2015 to more recent examples where dream creatures have always been protagonists. In some of the paintings, the cloud and its semantics are present in different expressions.
It becomes golden and entirely clad in gold leaf as in The Blue Man or The Mysticism of Beryllium almost simulating a giant bio-luminescent bacterium, and in Dream where the cloud becomes an ectoplasmic presence, a hybrid between a warrior and a floating insect, or in the painting Contra mundum where the figure oppressed by a dense, earthly cloud becomes a living presence but also a foggy brake on the progress of the human journey. These works are the synthesis of an existential bearing that approaches the vision of a dream or mystical awareness, of a miraculous theophany.
Arrivabene learnt first from Jacob Böhome and then from William Blake that imagination is the first emanation of divinity, the body of God, the divine limbs, and he drew the conclusion with them that the imaginative arts are the most important divine revelation; it is through imagination that one separates from mortality with the immortality of beauty.

To relegate Arrivabene's multifaceted artistic journey into a precise poetics, stylistic references or artistic currents is limiting and reductive. At first glance, he might appear to be moved by the automatic randomness of a surrealist, or under the despotic whim of a bizarre inspiration, of a mad hysteria, and we might be misled into considering him a traveller from afar. In reality, the light that shines in his works is like a thunderbolt, an inner inspirational flame.
Oniromancy, in the imagination of the Italian artist, represents the fusion between the world of dreams and the prophetic narration of an oracle. This term is composed of two key elements: 'Oniro', which derives from the Greek and means 'dream', and 'manzia', which means 'divinatory art' or 'prophecy'. Together, they evoke an artistic experience that feeds on the oneiric mystery and the ability to reveal hidden aspects of the human soul through art. In Arrivabene, oniromancy is a unique visual language through which to explore the boundaries of reality and metaphysical vision. His works are characterised by his ability to transform dreamlike visions into palpable, fascinating and desituating images. The artist plunges into the depths of the subconscious, capturing the essence of dreams and creating a bridge between the real and imaginary worlds.... read the rest of the article»