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

Location

537 West 20th Street New York New York, 10011

Dates

May 2—June 15, 2024

Opening Reception

Thursday, May 2, 6—8 PM

Gallery Hours

Tues—Sat 10am–6pm

Artist

Lucas Arruda

Press Release

Assum Preto

Lucas Arruda in Paris for the creation of his print diptych Untitled at Atelier René Tazé, 2023. Photo by Matthew Avignone. Explore the print here

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

Untitled (from the Deserto-Modelo series), 2023

Oil on linen

37 3/4 x 45 1/4 inches (96 x 115 cm)

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

Untitled (from the Deserto-Modelo series), 2024

Oil on canvas

11 3/4 x 13 3/4 inches (30 x 35 cm)

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

Untitled (from the Deserto-Modelo series), 2023

Oil on canvas

9 1/2 x 11 3/4 inches (24 x 30 cm)

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, Seestücke (Foto-Collagen), Sheet 185, 1969 (detail). Collection of Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau München, Munich, Germany

Lucas Arruda

Untitled (from the Deserto-Modelo series), 2023

Oil on canvas

9 3/4 x 12 1/8 inches (24.8 x 30.8 cm)

“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

John Constable, Cloud Study: Stormy Sunset, 1821-1822 (detail). Collection of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

Lucas Arruda

Untitled (from the Deserto-Modelo series), 2022

Oil on canvas

9 5/8 x 11 3/4 inches (24.5 x 30 cm)

“[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

Untitled (from the Deserto-Modelo series), 2023

Oil on canvas

11 3/4 x 14 5/8 inches (30 x 37 cm)

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)

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

Untitled (from the Deserto-Modelo series), 2024

Oil on canvas

7 7/8 x 9 1/2 inches (20 x 24 cm)

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

Alfredo Volpi, Untitled, c. 1960 (detail). © Instituto Volpi

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

Untitled (from the Deserto-Modelo series), 2023

Oil on canvas

9 1/2 x 11 3/4 inches (24 x 30 cm)

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, 2010

Giorgio Morandi, Natura morta (Still Life), 1953

Lucas Arruda

Untitled (from the Deserto-Modelo series), 2024

Oil on canvas

11 3/4 x 14 1/8 inches (29.9 x 35.9 cm)

“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

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

Untitled (from the Deserto-Modelo series), 2023

Oil on canvas

7 1/8 x 9 1/2 inches (18 x 24 cm)

“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

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

Untitled (from the Deserto-Modelo series), 2024

Oil on linen

37 3/4 x 45 1/4 inches (95.9 x 114.9 cm)

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: 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: 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

Untitled (from the Deserto-Modelo series), 2023

Oil on canvas

11 3/4 x 11 3/4 inches (30 x 30 cm)

“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

Untitled (from the Deserto-Modelo series), 2023

Oil on canvas

7 7/8 x 7 7/8 inches (20 x 20 cm)

“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

Armando Reveron, El Playón, 1929

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

Untitled (from the Deserto-Modelo series), 2024

Oil on canvas

12 x 12 inches (30.5 x 30.5 cm)

Installation view, Lucas Arruda: Assum Preto, David Zwirner, New York, 2024

A Recent Print Diptych by Lucas Arruda

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An installation view of the exhibition, Lucas Arruda: Assum Preto, at David Zwirner in New York, dated 2024.

Lucas Arruda

Untitled (from the Deserto-Modelo series), 2024

Oil on canvas

14 3/4 x 17 1/2 inches (37.5 x 44.5 cm)

Lucas Arruda

Untitled (from the Deserto-Modelo series), 2024

Oil on canvas

12 x 14 3/4 inches (30.5 x 37.5 cm)

Lucas Arruda

Untitled (from the Deserto-Modelo series), 2022

Oil on canvas

8 x 8 inches (20.3 x 20.3 cm)

Lucas Arruda

Untitled (from the Deserto-Modelo series), 2023

Oil on canvas

8 x 10 3/8 inches (20.3 x 26.4 cm)

Lucas Arruda

Untitled (from the Deserto-Modelo series), 2023

Oil on linen

38 x 45 1/2 inches (96.5 x 115.6 cm)

Lucas Arruda

Untitled (from the Deserto-Modelo series), 2023

Oil on linen

37 7/8 x 45 1/2 inches (96.2 x 115.6 cm)

Lucas Arruda

Untitled (from the Deserto-Modelo series), 2023

Oil on canvas

9 3/4 x 12 1/8 inches (24.8 x 30.8 cm)

Lucas Arruda

Untitled (from the Deserto-Modelo series), 2023

Oil on canvas

7 1/4 x 9 3/4 inches (18.4 x 24.8 cm)

Lucas Arruda

Untitled (from the Deserto-Modelo series), 2022

Oil on canvas

9 5/8 x 11 3/4 inches (24.5 x 30 cm)

Lucas Arruda

Untitled (from the Deserto-Modelo series), 2019/2022

Oil on canvas

12 x 12 inches (30.5 x 30.5 cm)

Lucas Arruda

Untitled (from the Deserto-Modelo series), 2024

Oil on canvas

9 1/2 x 12 inches (24.1 x 30.5 cm)

Lucas Arruda

Untitled (from the Deserto-Modelo series), 2023

Oil on canvas

9 1/2 x 12 inches (24.1 x 30.5 cm)

Lucas Arruda

Untitled (from the Deserto-Modelo series), 2023

Oil on canvas

15 3/4 x 15 3/4 inches (40 x 40 cm)

Lucas Arruda

Untitled (from the Deserto-Modelo series), 2022

Oil on canvas

12 x 14 3/4 inches (30.5 x 37.5 cm)

Lucas Arruda

Untitled (from the Deserto-Modelo series), 2024

Oil on canvas

12 x 14 3/4 inches (30.5 x 37.5 cm)

Lucas Arruda

Untitled (from the Deserto-Modelo series), 2022

Oil on canvas

9 5/8 x 11 3/4 inches (24.5 x 30 cm)

Lucas Arruda

Untitled (from the Deserto-Modelo series), 2024

Oil on canvas

12 x 14 3/4 inches (30.5 x 37.5 cm)

Lucas Arruda

Untitled (from the Deserto-Modelo series), 2024

Oil on canvas

12 x 12 inches (30.5 x 30.5 cm)

Lucas Arruda

Untitled (from the Deserto-Modelo series), 2023

Oil on canvas

12 x 12 inches (30.5 x 30.5 cm)

Lucas Arruda

Untitled (from the Deserto-Modelo series), 2024

Oil on linen

38 x 45 1/2 inches (96.5 x 115.6 cm)

Lucas Arruda

Untitled (from the Deserto-Modelo series), 2022

Oil on canvas

12 x 12 inches (30.5 x 30.5 cm)

Lucas Arruda

Untitled (from the Deserto-Modelo series), 2024

Oil on linen

37 3/4 x 45 1/4 inches (95.9 x 114.9 cm)

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