Lucas Arruda: Assum Preto
David Zwirner is pleased to present new work by the Brazilian artist Lucas Arruda, on view at the gallery’s 537 West 20th Street location in New York. Arruda is known for his intricate, meditative compositions that blur the boundaries between mnemonic and imaginative registers. His evocative landscapes are more products of a state of mind than depictions of particular locales. As he has noted, “The only reason to call my works landscapes is cultural—it’s simply that viewers automatically register my format as a landscape, although none of the images can be traced to a geographic location. It’s the idea of landscape as a structure, rather than a real place.”
The exhibition includes paintings and a site-specific light installation from his ongoing Deserto-Modelo series, marking the artist’s fourth solo presentation with the gallery.
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Image: Installation view, Lucas Arruda: Assum Preto, David Zwirner, New York, 2024
Assum Preto continues Arruda’s investigations into the painted medium and its ability to serve as an evocative and transcendental conduit for the unveiling of light, memory, and emotion. The exhibition is titled after a species of blackbird native to eastern Brazil—whose mundane birdsong, according to local tradition, is said to transform into a beautiful melody if the bird’s eyesight has been shaded.
Lucas Arruda
The exhibition features a series of Arruda’s seascapes, made on prepared surfaces using a reductive process whereby the impression of light is attained through the subtraction of pigment. Devoid of specific reference points, the seascapes are all grounded only by their thin horizon lines. Above and below this border, charged atmospheric conditions engage further dichotomies between sky and earth, the nebulous and the solid, the psychic and the visual.
Lucas Arruda
Installation view, Lucas Arruda: Assum Preto, David Zwirner, New York, 2024
Installation view, Lucas Arruda: Assum Preto, David Zwirner, New York, 2024
“Many of the artist’s works are characterized by a propensity for abstraction; their association with landscape is often only suggested by a horizon line, visible to varying degrees … the subject appears to have become a pretext for the artist to largely devote himself to exploring the possibilities offered by painting itself.”
—Moritz Wesseler, director, Fridericianum
Lucas Arruda
In their hazy ambiguity, some of Arruda’s seascapes bring to mind Gerhard Richter, whose own depictions of the ocean seem to only hint at the horizon line. While Arruda’s work finds different conceptual origins than Richter’s, his use of seriality mirrors that of the latter artist’s Atlas series, in which Richter rearranged various sea photographs to combine sky and water parts with differing light conditions.
Gerhard Richter, Seascape, 1975 (detail). Private Collection, Medina, Washington. Photo courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Gerhard Richter, Seascape, 1975 (detail). Private Collection, Medina, Washington. Photo courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Gerhard Richter, Seestücke (Foto-Collagen), Sheet 185, 1969 (detail). Collection of Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau München, Munich, Germany
Gerhard Richter, Seestücke (Foto-Collagen), Sheet 185, 1969 (detail). Collection of Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau München, Munich, Germany
Lucas Arruda
“Yet Arruda’s scenes are lonelier than those of the historical artists.… Turner and Constable gradually remove the figure in their work.… Arruda goes a step further. Apparently no one lives in or ventures to the places he paints.… The materiality of Arruda’s landscape is all but disregarded in favor of atmosphere.”
—Oliver Basciano, editor-at-large, ArtReview
Joseph Mallord William Turner, The Evening Star, c. 1830 (detail). Collection of The National Gallery, London
Joseph Mallord William Turner, The Evening Star, c. 1830 (detail). Collection of The National Gallery, London
John Constable, Cloud Study: Stormy Sunset, 1821-1822 (detail). Collection of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
John Constable, Cloud Study: Stormy Sunset, 1821-1822 (detail). Collection of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
Lucas Arruda
“[Arruda’s] paintings suggest a tenuous, fugitive, and mediated relation to nature as that which informs an aesthetic language. As viewers, we tend to make sense of the slightest mark within an open field, to immediately perceive a horizontal line as a horizon line, to create clouds from a change in direction of brushstrokes, and to perceive ground from a thick impasto. Arruda makes paintings we experience as at once beyond abstraction and yet before representation.”
—Lilian Tone, curator
Lucas Arruda
This exhibition debuts a group of small-scale, semi-abstract paintings that are constructed from a lexicon of symbolist motifs, marking a new turn in the artist’s practice while also harking back to the planar and architectonic forms that characterize his early oeuvre.
Lucas Arruda, Untitled (from the Deserto-Modelo series), 2023 (detail)
Lucas Arruda, Untitled (from the Deserto-Modelo series), 2023 (detail)
Arruda handles his brush lightly but with intense control, creating clouds and thickets of markings that delicately carve through the painted surface of the canvas in a manner recalling the textures and physicality of intaglio printmaking processes.
Lucas Arruda
In these works, he takes visual cues from the geometries and rich colorscapes found in the Brazilian modernist paintings of José Pancetti (1902–1958), Alfredo Volpi (1896–1988), and Amadeo Luciano Lorenzato (1900–1995).
José Pancetti, Marinha, n.d. Collection of Museum of Art of São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand
José Pancetti, Marinha, n.d. Collection of Museum of Art of São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand
Alfredo Volpi, Untitled, c. 1960 (detail). © Instituto Volpi
Alfredo Volpi, Untitled, c. 1960 (detail). © Instituto Volpi
Amadeo Luciano Lorenzato, Untitled, 1972 (detail)
Amadeo Luciano Lorenzato, Untitled, 1972 (detail)
Potent and open-ended, the symbols and motifs that populate these compositions—darkly brewing storms, empty canoes, and strings of outdoor lights—visualize the themes that permeate Arruda’s body of paintings, including the artist’s own dreams, experiences, and intuitions, through the lens of the sacred and the surreal.
Lucas Arruda
As if hovering at the precipice of memory itself, the imagery shifts in and out of focus. The tonal and graphic subtlety recalls the artist’s own early work, as well as that of Giorgio Morandi (1890–1964).
Lucas Arruda, Untitled, from Chiesa series, 2010
Lucas Arruda, Untitled, from Chiesa series, 2010
Lucas Arruda, Untitled, 2010
Lucas Arruda, Untitled, 2010
Giorgio Morandi, Natura morta (Still Life), 1953
Giorgio Morandi, Natura morta (Still Life), 1953
Lucas Arruda
“While specific motifs depict crosses, tilted arcs, and circular forms, others reference subtle elements from his earlier, figurative work, oscillating between echoes of Italian church windows and illuminated bulbs within still-life compositions. As a reclusive observer in a perennial ashram, Arruda embarks on introspective journeys of self-discovery, revisiting his artistic origins to present an elusive future entwined with an indomitable past.”
—Mateus Nunes, curator, writer, and researcher, in his 2024 essay “On Blindness”
Installation view, Lucas Arruda: Assum Preto, David Zwirner, New York, 2024
Installation view, Lucas Arruda: Assum Preto, David Zwirner, New York, 2024
The works on view are notable for their fogged colors—exploring subtle but intricate variations within a single hue—that range from dense reds to ethereal and almost intangible veils of white. Together, the works in this exhibition bring about a complex understanding of landscape as a product of a state of mind rather than a depiction of reality.
Lucas Arruda
“Then there are works that are easy to categorize as abstraction: monochromes, more or less—floating, horizontal rectangles of deep color.… They might easily put you in mind of Mark Rothko.”
—Barry Schwabsky, critic, art historian, and poet
Mark Rothko, Untitled (Black on Gray), 1969–70. Collection of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
Mark Rothko, Untitled (Black on Gray), 1969–70. Collection of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
Installation view, Lucas Arruda: Assum Preto, David Zwirner, New York, 2024
Installation view, Lucas Arruda: Assum Preto, David Zwirner, New York, 2024
By contrast, for the monochromes Arruda adds layer upon layer of pigment to pre-dyed raw canvas in an attempt to replicate its tinted hue in paint, methodically returning to each work for weeks or even months on end until the composition slowly builds into a hazy and ever-shifting wall of light.
Lucas Arruda
The exhibition in New York follows a series of institutional shows of the artist’s work over the past five years, including solo presentations at the Ateneo de Madrid; the Fundação Iberê Camargo in Porto Alegre, Brazil; the New Century Art Foundation | Pond Society in Shanghai; and the Fridericianum, in Kassel, Germany.
Installation view, Lucas Arruda: Assum Preto, Fundación Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Madrid at Biblioteca del Ateneo de Madrid, 2023. Photo by Miguel de Guzmán and Rocío Romero
Installation view, Lucas Arruda: Assum Preto, Fundación Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Madrid at Biblioteca del Ateneo de Madrid, 2023. Photo by Miguel de Guzmán and Rocío Romero
Installation view, Lucas Arruda: Lugar sem Lugar, Fundação Iberê Camargo, Porto Alegre, Brazil, 2021. Photo by Ding Musa
Installation view, Lucas Arruda: Lugar sem Lugar, Fundação Iberê Camargo, Porto Alegre, Brazil, 2021. Photo by Ding Musa
Installation view, Lucas Arruda, New Century Art Foundation | Pond Society, Shanghai, 2020
Installation view, Lucas Arruda, New Century Art Foundation | Pond Society, Shanghai, 2020
Installation view, Lucas Arruda: Deserto-Modelo, Fridericianum, Kassel, Germany, 2019. Photo by Simon Vogel
Installation view, Lucas Arruda: Deserto-Modelo, Fridericianum, Kassel, Germany, 2019. Photo by Simon Vogel
Towering and impenetrable, yet containing a sense of the infinite that surpasses its physical bounds, the jungle becomes in Arruda’s work a site of power and enlightenment as much as it is a harbinger of darkness and uncertainty—a place where one can be lost to the world and find themselves again.
Lucas Arruda
“Certainly, in his canvases, the inversion that places plants in a very close-up reverses the aesthetic idea of landscape as a space that opens up to the horizon. Here the horizon is always invisible: his ‘forests’ resemble skylines of vegetable metropolises whose depth is impossible to sense and measure. But it is precisely this impenetrability that transforms the landscape into the sign of a strange historical density that has yet to be explored.”
—Emanuele Coccia, philosopher
Lucas Arruda
“As well as consciously reflecting on different traditions in the history of art, such as nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European and South American painting or postwar American abstraction, Arruda’s paintings manifest a tireless striving to capture time in its inscrutability.”
—Moritz Wesseler, director, Fridericianum
Alberto da Veiga Guignard, Ouro Preto: St. John’s Eve, 1942 (detail). Collection of The Museum of Modern Art, New York. © Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY
Alberto da Veiga Guignard, Ouro Preto: St. John’s Eve, 1942 (detail). Collection of The Museum of Modern Art, New York. © Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY
Armando Reveron, El Playón, 1929
Armando Reveron, El Playón, 1929
Lucas Arruda, Untitled (from the Deserto-Modelo series), 2023 (detail)
Lucas Arruda, Untitled (from the Deserto-Modelo series), 2023 (detail)
The artist’s jungles dwell in verticality; their genesis lies in the artist’s formative memories of the verdant foliage outside his bedroom window. For Arruda, the quasi-mythical scenery of the Brazilian rainforest coaxes out tensions between reality and human imagination.
Lucas Arruda
Installation view, Lucas Arruda: Assum Preto, David Zwirner, New York, 2024
Installation view, Lucas Arruda: Assum Preto, David Zwirner, New York, 2024
A Recent Print Diptych by Lucas Arruda
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