Lucas Arruda

The painting is dated 2017, oil on canvas, a tight, abstract mass of grey and brown tones. Up close you can appreciate the small, sharp brushstrokes meticulously applied in all directions. The result is a gaseous, cloudy kind of abstraction. Spots of light emerge down the middle of the painting, radiating out so that the canvas's top half is markedly lighter than its lower half. That said, there's little in the way of a single resting point for the eye. At the very bottom – just a centimetre from the edge of this 26 x 30 cm work – the most dramatic distinction in the composition is found: the nature of the brushstrokes changes, becoming longer, perhaps more gestural, and running horizontally from left to right, and back. This section could be identified as representing a landmass above which sits a hazy mist; though just as likely, given the nature of the brushwork, the painting could depict the ocean itself, the vast sky hanging over the water.

São Paulo-based Lucas Arruda, who is in his mid-thirties, has been making paintings like this since the early 2010s. This one, like those before it and those likely to come for the foreseeable future, is untitled, but belongs to a series monikered Deserto-Modelo (Desert-Model, a title inspired by a poem by João Cabral de Melo Neto, in which the idea of the 'model' is best understood as a 'prototype' or 'concept'). The other works are roughly the same diminutive size. This one is on canvas, though some are on wood. For most, including this painting, the artist uses a process of sanding to archive some of the tonal variation. 'Landscape' or 'seascape' could just as easily describe these works, though Arruda also produces simpler monochromes: plain canvases of brooding colour, uniform bar a sanded-down edge.

Arruda's union of light and dark – those almost luminous pockets of near white, around which the gloomier brushstrokes dance – are reminiscent of the glowing sunsets and sunrises in the seventeenth-century landscapes of Claude Lorrain; the vast skies (relative to the painting's modest scale, of course) meanwhile allude to the Romantic Sublime. One could produce a decent comparative study between the brooding greys of two untitled works by Arruda, shows at a solo exhibition at Mendes Wood DM, São Paulo, in 2016, and J.M.W. Turner's Snow Storm – Steam-Boat off a Harbour's Mouth (1842). There's a similar turbulence to the brushwork, a similar invocation of the apparently infinite power of nature, a similar feeling of impotence provoked in the viewer by that thought. Yet Arruda's scenes are lonelier than those of the historical artists. Claude utilizes people in his mythical landscapes to convey scale and narrative. Turner and Constable gradually remove the figure in their work. Turner's A Disaster at Sea (1835) depicts a ship and its crew all but engulfed by stormy waters, with later works by the artist increasingly depopulated, as are Constable's swirling cloud studies, 1821–22. Arruda goes a step further. Apparently no one lives in or ventures to the places he paints (except, in a way, us): in fact, the materiality of Arruda's landscape is all but disregarded in favour of atmosphere.

His subjects are entirely imaginary, though they play on old colonial fantasies of an untouched, uninhabited land. This is not Brazil, or anywhere else for that matter, but that's not to say we can't bring our own histories and memories to bear on the work. What draws me to the grey, gloomy painting described above is, more than anything, a familiarity with the palette from the weather in Britain (a favourite subject, incidentally, of Constable and Turner). When I saw some of these works on a visit to Arruda's studio in São Paulo earlier this year, it was winter in Brazil, the darkness falling in early evening even though an intense light characteristic of the southern hemisphere remained during the day. At the time he was preparing for an exhibition in London, at David Zwirner in September; Arruda asked me what I thought the weather would be like in the dying days of the British summer, what the light conditions might be. He'd painted a section of the studio wall a slight off-white, a palette that would eventually be replicated on the London gallery's walls. When the grey painting was hung against this slightly dulled background, it was striking how much the small, subtle change made the canvas bloom, compared to those works on normal white walls everywhere in the workspace. Something similar occurred in 2015 when Arruda decided to shroud his hometown solo exhibition at Pivô in darkness, each painting spotlit. The paintings began to act as little portals for light, or perhaps even receptacles for it. And in that sense, the best description of them might be one more commonly associated with the work of James Turrell: lightscapes.

Light is a preoccupation – perhaps the preoccupation – for Arruda, as for so many painters before him. He takes his interest to extremes, however, searching for a purity of light, an absolute light, in that it is not just a mode of representation, but is utilised by the artist to investigate themes of perception and optics. At his 2016 Mendes Wood DM exhibition, which was titled Deserto-Modelo as above so below, he painted a series of rectangles, in almost indistinguishably pale colours, directly onto the white walls. Above each was a rectangle of light emitted by a ceiling-mounted empty slide projector. Both were hard to see with the gallery lights on, but a timer intermittently shut them down, at which point the painted rectangle disappeared from sight and the projected rectangle came into clear focus. After a few minutes, the projected light was cut too, leaving the gallery in darkness. Yet for the viewer, for a few moments at least, the squares of light seemingly remained, an afterimage temporarily burned onto the retina. These were then dispelled as the gallery lights flicked back on and the whole nine-minute cycle started afresh.

Although, again, light in general is Arruda's subject, it is specifically a change of light, or cycles of light, that he's documenting. In the grey painting, the sun seems to be at the point of breaking through the gloom. The dark brown hues of another recent work are suggestive of the very first moments of sunrise, when just the faintest orange glow on the horizon breaks the night. This is not a new development in his painting: one can imagine the turbulent grey-blue skies in a 25 x 31 cm painting from 2014, for example, are about to burse, and we, the viewers, are catching sigh of the heavy sky just moments before the downpour. Time is an explicit component of a 2017 multimedia work, a series of paintings made directly on slides – the brushwork more gestural than those on canvas – presented on a rotary projector over several minutes. The subject of time in Arruda's work was also highlighted, via curatorial intervention at an exhibition at Mendes Wood DM, New York, in May this year. In each of Arruda's paintings was paired with one of On Kawara's, from the late New York series (1966-2013), in which he painted in white against a red, blue, grey, or black background. For example, a golden vista by Arruda – as glowing as the grey painting is muted – hung next to a Kawara that simply states '28Dec.1981' against a navy blue background; the exhibition brought to the fore the diaristic, as well as meditative, qualities of Arruda's painting.

As in Kawara's seminal series, Arruda paints the passing of days, months and years; the Brazilian's daybreaks and sunsets, spring light and winter blues a reminder that time is essentially measured through shifts in light. We know another day has gone because the sun dips in the west, that autumn is upon us because the amount of light lessens (whichever hemisphere we find ourselves in). As the work itself is a documentation of change, Arruda can keep painting roughly the same subject. The grey painting, as winter falls, marks another year passing.