Luca Arruda
No matter the landscape
This is the first monographic exhibition in a French museum devoted to this emblematic artist of the contemporary Brazilian scene. A true prodigy of the pictorial gesture, he develops his work around light and consistently depicts landscapes, following a rigorous approach that leads him from figuration to abstraction.
For over fifteen years, the artist has been producing a serial body of work consisting of small-format paintings, called Deserto-Modelo, a term borrowed from the Brazilian poet João Cabral de Melo Neto. These “desert models” – that is, imaginary landscapes, interior visions painted from memory in the studio – are never created on location or from photographs, but are always mnemonic reconstructions, close to abstraction. In the manner of the Impressionists, however, the question of light and the sensitive projection of a form of introspection are particularly perceptible.
As the artist describes it: “Light is at the center of my work, it is movement. It is light that guides my painting, that creates intensity and ends up creating spaces that are neither abstract nor figurative.” Although small, Lucas Arruda’s paintings are charged with great dramatic tension, so that each brushstroke is decisive, paradoxically monumental on the scale of the canvas.
The inspiration for this invitation to Lucas Arruda comes from this simple and spontaneous sensation, widely shared by observers of his paintings: they are familiar to us, in painting or in mind. These panoramic motifs – horizon lines, edged with dense jungles or cloudy skies – border on universality, so difficult is it to identify the places or periods represented. However, Lucas Arruda’s paintings do not entirely adhere to the pictorial tradition of landscape, otherwise richly represented in the collections of the Musée d’Orsay, within which our minds immediately connect them.
This long lineage, which includes the pictorial work of Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot and the Barbizon school, the stormy seascapes of Gustave Courbet, the ponds of Eugène Boudin, without forgetting of course the impressionists Claude Monet and Paul Cézanne, is made up of works created from observations of reality, whereas Lucas Arruda’s production is entirely imagined. In this perspective, the repetition of the motif in series, which the representation of light will fundamentally vary, becomes the cornerstone of a more intuitive rapprochement between Lucas Arruda and Claude Monet.
The exhibition itinerary follows the progression of this reflection, mobilizing around thirty impressionist paintings from the collections of the Musée d’Orsay, alongside around thirty paintings by Lucas Arruda, in the impressionist gallery (5th floor).
