Lucas Arruda’s work obstinately concentrates on a well-defined theme within the canon of art history in order to examine complex contemporary mental states. His research develops fundamentally around landscape, thinking and experimenting with our capacity of living through the mediation of light and the gaze.

Through a powerful and cohesive series of oil paintings, as well as slide projections and light installations, his landscapes exist in the point of tension between abstraction and figuration, between apparition and emptiness. With each gaze, experiences are demarcated in a process of construction and reconstruction of memory, as if the formulation of fields of colour touched on the immaterial body of temporal landscapes and experienced sensations.

As we move above and below horizon lines, the artist puts us before atmospheres that are charged with visual as well as metaphysical questions. Between sky and earth, the ethereal and solid, the imagination and the reality, a meditative contemplation finds its routine while following an endless, and not always clear, a cycle of sublimation and deposition of matter.

Lucas Arruda (São Paulo, 1983) lives and works in São Paulo.
His most recent solo exhibitions include Deserto-Modelo, Fridericianum, Kassel (2019); Lucas Arruda, David Zwirner, New York (2019); Neutral Corner, Mendes Wood DM, Brussels (2018); Days and Horizons – Lucas Arruda & On Kawara, Mendes Wood DM, New York (2017); Deserto-Modelo, Indipendenza, Rome (2016); Deserto-Modelo, Lulu, México DF (2015); Deserto-Modelo, Pivô, São Paulo (2015).

Additionally, his work has been included in institutional group exhibitions such as Seismic Movements, Dhaka Art Summit, Dhaka, 2020; Volcano Extravaganza 2019 – DEATH, Fiorucci Art Trust, Stromboli (2019); City Prince/sses), Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2019); Anozero – Bienal de Arte Contemporânea de Coimbra, Coimbra (2017); Soft Power. Arte Brasil, Kunsthal KAdE, Amersfoort (2016); New Shamans/Novos Xamãs: Brazilian Artists, Rubell Family Collection, Miami (2016).