Lucas Arruda: Deserto-Modelo

In September, David Zwirner will present an exhibition of new work by Lucas Arruda. On view at 525 West 19th Street in New York will be paintings that revolve around a play between light and color. Some are near-monochromatic compositions verging on abstraction, while others depict vaguely familiar vistas, including seascapes and wild forests, which are always painted from memory. All are built up with textured brushwork and grounded by an ever-present—if sometimes faint—horizon line that offers a perception of distance.

In his “monochromes,” the artist applies paint to presaturated canvases, further blurring the notions of foreground and background. As he has noted, light and color are used to uncover a “sensation, a state of mind suspended within the medium of paint … that can’t be grasped through language because there aren’t sufficient visual elements to describe it.”1

This will be Arruda’s second solo exhibition at David Zwirner. The Brazilian artist had his inaugural show at the gallery in London in 2017, and in 2018, his work was included in the Nature and Abstraction exhibition at the Fondation Beyeler, Basel. A major solo exhibition of his work opened at the Fridericianum in Kassel, Germany, on June 6, 2019.

Read more

Image: Lucas Arruda, Untitled (from the Deserto-Modelo series), 2018

1 Angeria Rigamonti di Cutò, “Lucas Arruda: ‘The only reason to call my works landscapes is cultural,’” Studio International (September 19, 2017), accessed online.