IL PITTORE MISTICO

THE MYSTIC PAINTER

AGOSTINO ARRIVABENE, ARVIN GOLROKH,

RUBEN PANG, ALESSANDRO SICIOLDR

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, Arvin Golrokh, Ruben Pang and Alessandro Sicioldr. 

Four artists, each pursuing an independent yet coherent artistic path, united by a shared inclination towards what transcends the visible. In an age dominated by rationality, productivity, and algorithms, their practices explore the possibilities of intuition, imagination, and the inner world.

At the heart of the project lies a simple yet radical idea: to conceive the act of painting as a threshold to another realm, a means of accessing what eludes immediate perception. Through Symbolist painting, dreamlike visions, and the creation of perceptual experiences, The Mystic Painter explores art’s power to evoke the invisible and open up new perspectives on the mystery of existence.

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

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.