Walking through Assum Preto, Lucas Arruda’s current exhibition at David Zwirner, I was reminded of the composer Morton Feldman, a perceptive commentator on the visual arts, who once described his compositions as “time canvases.” Feldman sought an aural equivalent to the texture and scale of Abstract Expressionist paintings like those of Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman. To this end, late in his career, he began to explore subtleties of repetition and variation in chamber pieces as long as six hours—music, Feldman said, that did not “exist by way of time, in time or about time… but as time…time as an image… time undisturbed.”
“Time undisturbed” is an apt description for the thirty-nine paintings included in Assum Preto, which follow one another in a procession of motifs that recur without repeating. Sensations of temporality permeate these works—as portraits of light, like in Arruda’s seascapes; in the virtually inexhaustible optical depth of the larger abstracts; and in many of his jungle paintings, their surfaces ghostly and faded like an uncovered artifact—but it is a temporality without motion, time arrested. Ostensibly representational, Arruda’s work often verges on abstraction. In the seascapes, for example, there are no figures to narrativize the scene, nor any objects to establish a sense of internal scale. Clouds looming or departing, dense with pressure or suffused with light, tranquil or turbulent, always suspended over the merest suggestion of a horizon, become their own context, without external reference, suggesting no specific place.