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Lucas Arruda

Untitled from Deserto-Modelo series, 2019

Photo: Everton Ballardin | Courtesy the artist Mendes Wood DM, Sao Paulo, Brussels and New York

Lucas Arruda

Collection

Lucas Arruda

Untitled (from the series Deserto-Modelo), 2019

Oil on canvas
18.2 x 24.5 x 2.2 cm
TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Collection

At first glance Lucas Arruda’s dense, atmospheric paintings appear like fields of pure abstraction, but upon closer inspection, they reveal dreamlike depictions of oceans, twilight or dawn, and rolling banks of fog or clouds—the compositions remain ambiguous enough for multiple readings. Arruda paints these enigmatic scenes from memory, unmooring them from geographical specificity and letting them pulse with imagined serenity and power. The artist generates a mysterious ambience with his muted palette, the colors subtly shifting and the brushwork evocative and scratchy.

The four paintings from the TBA21 Collection belong to the series Deserto-Modelo, where different scenery invokes the genre of landscape using minimal elements that can be reduced to a subtle horizon line. Arruda’s paintings capture the enigmatic nature of time, inviting contemplation and resisting the fast-paced rhythms of our world with an evocative and poignant power. Despite the fact that the artist frequents the tropical forest near Barra do Una in the state of São Paulo, where his father has a home, he does not intend to replicate that specific landscape, but rather to depict an irresistible landscape that becomes a symbol of a historical density yet to be explored, a landscape that dreams of escaping the small, rectangular canvas it is limited to. Never losing sight of the paintings’ sensual and sensuous appearance, Arruda is in dialogue with artists from different periods who shared this reflection on atmospheric changes, like English painter JMW Turner (1775–1851).

These paintings act as a place meant to re-calibrate our senses so that we could accept the agency of the many existing forms of life and overcome the widespread Western notion of “nature,” often conceptualized as a blank space to explore and colonize.

PAST EXHIBITIONS:

Group show: Remedios
Venue: C3A Centro de Creación Contemporánea de Andalucía, Córdoba
Curator: Daniela Zyman
Date: April 14, 2023 - March 30, 2024

Group show: Liquid Intelligence

Curator: Chus Martínez with Soledad Gutiérrez and María Montero Sierra,

Venue: National Museum Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

Date: October 10, 2023 – January 28, 2024

Related works in the collection

Lucas Arruda Untitled from Deserto-Modelo series, 2019

Lucas Arruda Untitled (from the Deserto-Modelo series), 2021

Lucas Arruda Untitled (from the Deserto-Modelo series), 2019

Artists

Lucas Arruda