Exhibitions

Event organised as part of the Brazilian Season in France 2025

This significant retrospectiive of works by Lucas Arruda features paintings, films, and installations from different periods of his career, including some produced specifically for the occasion. The exhibition, which will occupy the entire floor of the temporary spaces, will showcase the different aspects of his practice. Arruda is fundamentally concerned with landscape, human thought, and the experimentation of our capacity to live through the mediation of light and the gaze. His landscapes exist at the point of tension between abstraction and figuration, between appearance and emptiness.

Arruda has used the phrase Deserto-Modelo—a line from the poems of João Cabral de Melo Neto—to unite these seemingly disparate elements of his practice, invoking it as the title of many of his exhibitions as well as individual paintings, as if to signify that the same process, the same quest, never ceases to be pursued. The desert is a timeless place where we can experience ourselves, make an inner journey. The painting is there to take us, as it were, beyond the visible. With each glance, experiences are delineated in a process of construction and reconstruction of memory, as if the formulation of color fields touched the immaterial body of temporal landscapes and lived sensations. In these works, colors are not easy to define and acquire a cerebral dimension. What seems to be most important is the relationship of the colors to each other, rather than the colors themselves.

Arruda’s paintings are reminiscent of the Impressionists, Turner, the history of Brazilian landscape painting and Giorgio Morandi. Like Morandi, he always uses the same structure, tending towards abstraction and a metaphysical dimension. The absence of human figures invites introspection and meditation, while avoiding any narrative. Technically, his work is a question of subtracting and adding matter. In the monochromes, layers of paint are superimposed on a prepared canvas, with the light coming from behind. In the seascapes, paint is subtracted using a fine brush, leaving behind very fine layers of color and light.

The exhibition will be echoed by a simultaneous presentation in the musée d’Orsay’s Impressionist Gallery (level 5), Qu’importe le paysage, from April 8 to July 20, 2025, where Lucas Arruda’s works will be displayed in dialogue and complementarity with Monet’s paintings.

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