Bridging abstraction and figuration, the landscapes and seascapes of Lucas Arruda’s paintings recall the Romantic sublime, as epitomized by 19th century landscapes, through a contemporary lens. In Untitled, Arruda presents us with what appears to be a blue sea cloaked by a stormy grey foreboding sky. Intended to more closely represent the landscape of the artist’s imagination than real environments, Untitled and Arruda’s other meditations comprise the Deserto-Modelo series that the artist has been working on for the last decade. This long-term investigation of painting’s nature is on one hand influenced by the writings of Brazilian poet João Cabral de Melo Neto and Dino Buzzati’s 1940 book O Deserto dos Tártaros, but Arruda was also inspired by a wide range of artists such as Alfredo Volpi and Agnes Martin. Evocative of so many pictures—an ocean by J. M. W. Turner; a misty beach scene by Armando Reverón; James Abbott McNeill Whistler’s Nocturne: Blue and Silver – Chelsea, 1871 at Tate, London—Untitled encourages the viewer to examine nature through the astute and diverse eyes of the artists we so admire. |
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[left] James Abbott McNeill Whister, Nocturne: Blue and Silver – Chelsea, 1871. Tate Gallery, London, Photo credit © Tate, London / Art Resource, NY
[right] Armando Reverón, El Playón, 1929. Private Collection. |
“He is, it seems, genuinely compelled by the idea of capturing lived experience in paint. Part of that is being metaphorically on the outer fringe of civilization and peering into the unknown and perhaps unknowable cosmos. It is the thrill of the sublime. The other part is the strange and fascinating fact that mere colored paste smeared on fabric in the right way can evoke infinity without surrendering its own immediately sensual finitude” – Ken Johnson, The New York Times
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By ironically executing landscapes and seascapes—expansive scenes typically experienced on a monumental scale—in such an intimate format, Arruda strikes a dynamic balance between our close relationship with and the vastness of nature. “It’s the counterpoint that I like,” Arruda elucidated. “The tension of the wide spaces to the small canvases, and also, the more you get near them, the less you can access them.”[i] The intimate size of Untitled invites us to approach the painting, likening the viewing experience to peering through a portal into another dimension.
The question that haunts Arruda's paintings however, is that of what we are truly seeing. In fact, Untitled seems to recall less a seascape existing in reality than a hazy memory of one, which we are not—like with all recollections— |
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Barnett Newman, Shining Forth (to George), 1961. Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, Photo: Georges Meguerditchian © CNAC/MNAM/Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY, Artwork © 2020 Barnett Newman Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York |
able to remember with perfect accuracy. Indeed, “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,” Arruda has explained. "It’s the idea of landscape as a structure, rather than a real place.”[ii] |
J.M.W. Turner, Seascape with a Sailing Boat and a Ship, circa 1825-1830. Tate Gallery, London, Photo credit: © Tate, London / Art Resource, NY |
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“I don’t think of myself as a landscape painter. It’s common to view my work through the lens of the sublime, but it’s more complex than that. My work is informed at a technical level by certain landscape painting, in the use of color and brushwork for example, or Constable’s clouds, which are the best in that tradition. But those painters were observing nature"
– Lucas Arruda
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Typically painted at dawn, Arruda’s Deserto-Modelo paintings often seem to allude to day break; this is the case in Untitled, the sea in which seems to be illuminated by rising, soft sunlight. As opposed to simply imitating nature, however, the artist seeks to reveal “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.”[iii] The Deserto-Modelo works are thus much alike the abstracted days and memories they represent—none are the same, as each is subtly different, articulating its own unique sensation. |
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Agnes Martin, Untitled, 2002. Musee National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, Photo: Philippe Migeat ©CNAC/MNAM/Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY, Artwork © 2020 Agnes Martin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York |