The Visionary Worlds of Agostino Arrivabene

Agostino Arrivabene lives and works in a seventeenth century iron-gated house outside Milan. His home provides the secluded, protected environment in which he finds the solitude and space necessary to create his stunning paintings. Arrivabene says, “My house is like a nautilus shell wherein time has stopped. Inside you will encounter a rarefied atmosphere where … scarlet velvet mingles with coral-colored walls, and ancient, deformed animals watch over my slow, artist’s movements, and where the window seeps in northern light which floods the floors a blue pearl color, much like that of the exhumed dead. I live just as certainly as a hermit or an old ghost, a sweet dog by my side and a Ukranian maid who looks after me from time to time.” And from this “nautilus shell” of his seventeenth century house “wherein time has stopped,” Arrivabene’s masterful paintings in turn 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.