2020
Based in figuration, his luminous and almost obsessional series of landscape paintings come very close to abstraction with their painstakingly executed renderings of the effects of light.
The work of Brazilian artist Lucas Arruda is very specific and serial, consisting in small-format paintings grouped under the generic title Deserto-Modelo, a term he borrowed from the Brazilian poet João Cabral de Melo Neto and which he uses for all his exhibitions. This “model” of an imaginary landscape serves as a basis for all his paintings, which run the range from rep- resentation to abstraction and fre- quently take the form of small pano- ramas in which a horizon can be glimpsed, even if it often merges with the ocean, the beach or the sky. Sometimes, though, his work be- comes more figurative, such as when he depicts the vegetal thickets of an imaginary jungle. Arruda’s paintings are difficult to date and the places they represent hard to iden- tify, but so much is our relationship to landscapes conditioned by our memories and by the history of art that they produce in us a strange impression of déjà-vu – like with the work of Armando Reverón, a Venezuelan painter whom Arrudahas studied in depth, or, nearer to home, Turner perhaps. Viewing Arruda’s exhibitions is a powerful, contemplative and, dare one say, luminous experience, since light is at the heart of his work – sometimes he even goes so far as to replace his paintings with slide projections.