Lucas Arruda

Lucas Arruda (born 1983, São Paulo), is a Brazilian painter living and working in São Paulo, Brazil. He received his Bachelor of Fine Arts from , São Paulo, Brazil in 2009. He was at the forefront of a generation of artists in Brazil who reclaimed painting in an art scene then largely dominated by conceptual art. He is known for his atmospheric landscape paintings that exist at the border between abstraction and figuration, between mnemonic and imaginative registers. Characterized by their subtle rendition of light and a meditative quality, Arruda's landscapes are charged with visual as well as metaphysical questions.

Work Lucas Arruda's work and research develops fundamentally around landscape and light as well-defined themes within art historical canon in order to examine complex contemporary mental states. "allied to the metaphor of the desert understood as an atemporal place that can't be grasped through language". achieving "a live experience that operates through the mediation of light and the gaze" as noted by curator Hans Ulrich Obrist.

While early reviews of Arruda's work tended to inscribe his paintings within the Romantic sublime tradition and referenced artists like Caspar David Friedrich and Edward Hopper, Arruda himself, in citing influences, rather refers to J. M. W. Turner's late work, the Venezuelan artist Armando Reverón's landscape paintings and Giorgio Morandi, emphasizing the mathematical and metaphysical impulses in his work, and insists on "the idea of landscape as a structure, rather than a real place". In the first edition of Magma, edited by Paul Olivennes, Arruda is featured among notable contemporaries, presenting art and literary works associated with the modern revival of avant-garde aesthetics. This publication featured a previously unpublished painting by Arruda to accompany the poem "La Maison des Sables" (1965) by French poet and post-colonial philosopher Édouard Glissant.

Publications

Lucas Arruda. Deserto-Modelo (2022, Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther & Franz König, ) Lucas Arruda: Deserto-Modelo (2020, David Zwirner Books, ) Lucas Arruda (2018, Cahiers d'Art & Editora Cobogó, )