Agostino Arrivabene. The parasitic host

Exhibition catalog Agostino Arrivabene. The parasitic host, curated by Chatia Cicero and Alberto Zanchetta, Museum of Contemporary Art of Lissone, 25 February – 14 May 2017.

The Museum of Contemporary Art of Lissone presents The parasitic host, an exhibition that intends to offer a kaleidoscopic approach to the art of Agostino Arrivabene (Rivolta d'Adda, 1967), revealing the most changeable and unpredictable aspects that are triggered in a game of connections, dissonances and dialogues between paintings, installations e marvels.
What is the artist if not The parasitic host of his own ideas and obsessions? The title evokes the ambivalent condition of being a host, from ospitato, and the need to draw emotional energy from sources and situations that feed their creativity. The charm, suffering and disgust transmitted by reality are vital forms of nourishment for Arrivabene, transformed by the imagination to build a new way of seeing, a personal myth to use as a guide.
The parasitic influence also extends to the interior of the paintings: entomological insertions, peduncles or inflorescences feed on the flesh of the portrayed characters, letting the proliferation of new connective tissues that sometimes end up almost swallowing the vital breath. The result is a visionary conception in which the vegetable world, animal and human coexist in each other to establish a perpetual embrace as well as a natural development / teratomorphic fusion. Arrivabene's is a cultured and seductive painting, imbued with symbols and puzzles enlivened by countless models of inspiration: from classical mythology to the masters of the fifteenth-sixteenth century, in primis Leonardo, Dürer, Bosch, and in the more recent past Moreau, Redon, Ernst. The viewer is thus captured by veiled messages, as if he were to participate in an initiatory journey that leads to the revelation of an ancestral knowledge, of which the artist is the generator and dispenser. Like an alchemist, Arrivabene brings to life experiences of a mystical nature, going beyond the space-time limits of the personality, of the conscious and unconscious, in the incessant exploration of an inner universe that winds through reminiscences of lives already lived or only dreamed of.
The wider exhibition path hosts some marvels (or, objects that arouse amazement) from the artist's personal collection, allowing the public to open their gaze inside an authentic room of wonders: artificialia and naturalia stage an extraordinary theatrum mundi all around, a source of further epiphanies. In contrast to some "organic installations": skulls, flowers and butterflies - symbols of vanitas that allude to the transience of existence - through dissections and parasitic grafts are transformed into new simulacra of life, safeguarded inside glass bells so that they remain immutable to the passage of time.
In the museum spaces of Lissone it is recomposed, so, a microcosm of the imagination. In fact, the exhibition will allow us to explore the composite variety of expressions that make up not only the work but also the esoteric and hallucinatory world of Arrivabene in which, ideas, fears and dreams have been able to "rise above" to transcend the concreteness of lived reality.

[from the press release of the exhibition]