Artist22: Agostino Arrivabene

Agostino Arrivabene is another modern Italian artist who uses older, more traditional media and techniques. His drawings and paintings move across varying degrees of surrealism and abnormality. Like an artist I previously looked at, Roberto Ferri, Arrivabene shows strong inspiration from both Renaissance and Baroque art in his technique and composition. But Arrivabene goes much further into abstraction and surrealism than his classical counterparts - and even more so than Ferri.

He makes an obvious effort to make his art look old and dilapidated. It seems like he's trying to insert the art he's making now back into the 16th and 17th centuries as some to create the feeling of some sort of strange, archaic mysticism lost to modern art.



Like Renaissance and Baroque artists, Arrivabene seems to fixate on the human figure in much of his art. His figures are displayed as realistic and anatomically correct, but then Arrivabene consistently inserts some strange, otherworldly addition to the body.



It's really refreshing seeing an artist with a more classical style use such non-traditional subject matter. So many artists have moved so far into the abstract and away from tradition as to make the physical process of making art sometimes seem obsolete. I'm certainly not complaining about the current diversity of styles, techniques, forms of expression, etc in the modern world, but I like seeing art as a traditional craft requiring precise physical control and practice. Arrivabene's ability to combine high skill and dexterity with a good sense for aesthetics allows him to move in between  realism and abstraction in a really cool way.