IL PITTORE MISTICO

THE MYSTIC PAINTER

AGOSTINO ARRIVABENE, ARVIN GOLROKH,

RUBEN PANG, ALESSANDRO SICIOLDR, KENJI SUGIYAMA

on view from 15.10.2026

at 

Primo Marella Gallery Lugano

(EXHIBITION SPACE 2)

Via Lucchini 10, 6900 Lugano, CH

Primo Marella Gallery Lugano is pleased to present, in the Exhibition Space 2, Il Pittore Mistico (The Mystic Painter): a special project that brings together the works of Agostino Arrivabene, Alessandro Sicioldr, Arvin Golrokh, Ruben Pang and Kenji Sugiyama.

Five artists, five autonomous and coherent paths, united by a shared tension toward the symbolic, the sacred, and the visionary. In an age dominated by rationality, productivity and algorithms, these artists choose another path: that of intuition, spirituality and painting as an act of revelation.

At the heart of the project is a simple but radical idea: to return the artwork to its original function as a “door” to an elsewhere, as a tool to get in touch with the invisible. Whether dreamlike visions, sacred apparitions, inner myths or transforming figurations, Il Pittore Mistico places painting at the center as a spiritual medium, capable of embodying mystery and making it visible.

Arvin Golrokh (1992, Tehran, Iran) explores painting as a site of tension, where image-making becomes an act of resistance against imposed narratives and fixed meanings. Rooted in a rigorous technical training, his work draws on historical and ideological imagery, only to fracture and reassemble it through dense, layered compositions.

In Golrokh’s practice, the image is never neutral: it is a field of power, memory, and collective perception, continuously destabilized.

Rather than offering clarity, Golrokh constructs ambiguity, forcing the viewer into a prolonged encounter with the work. Through distortion, accumulation, and displacement, he dismantles authoritative images – those shaped by propaganda or historical domination – to expose their fragility and internal contradictions.

Bicharegan (بیچارگان), “the miserable": not merely victims, but those excluded from the cycle of power, destined to be forgotten. They are the ones who endure history without ever being able to write it.

– ARVIN GOLROKH

Kenji Sugiyama’s (1962, Nagoya, Japan) practice revolves around the relationship between visual perception, memory, and identity. Through a language that combines installation, mirrors, and optical illusions, the artist constructs three-dimensional spaces that challenge the way we observe and interpret reality.

Since 1998, with his Institute of Intimate Museums project, Sugiyama has conceived imaginary museums and libraries: intimate spaces in which objects, images, and personal memories accumulate in a dimension suspended between reality and imagination. His works invite viewers to look beyond the surface, embarking on a journey of introspection in which vision becomes an intimate and subjective act, capable of revealing new meanings through shifting and unexpected perspectives.

The aim was to condition and narrow the way of looking, and to give concrete form to these ideas.”

— Kenji Sugiyama

Drawing from a multifaceted lineage – ranging from ancient mystical systems and medieval religious imagery to Romanticism, Symbolism, and the unconscious terrain explored by Surrealism – this new wave of mystical painters seeks to redefine the visual language of spirituality in the 21st century. Their work inhabits liminal territories: spaces where the sacred and the profane overlap, where memory merges with myth, and where time dissolves into layered, dreamlike states. 

Il Pittore Mistico also draws from Surrealist and psychological legacies, accessing the unconscious as a generative space. Influenced by the idea of the collective psyche and archetypal symbolism, these works often resist linear narratives or fixed interpretations. Instead, they invite the viewer into ambiguous terrains where personal memory, dream logic, and ancient myth coalesce. 

What unites these artists is not a common style, but a shared ethos: the belief that art can be a transformational act. Their process – often slow, layered, and tactile – reflects a devotion to material as ritual. Through gestures of scratching, erasing, and layering, painting becomes a ritual that evokes the sacred without depicting it – a threshold between matter and spirit.

In this scenario, The Mystic Painter's project reflects a renewed search for transcendence as attunement, celebrating slowness, introspection, and art as a space of healing and connection beyond the self.