Lucas Arruda Qu'importe le paysage @ Musée d'Orsay

Lucas Arruda, Untitled (from the Deserto-Modelo series), 2023

It was a treat to visit Lucas Arruda's exhibition, Qu'importe le paysage, with my friend Janise, a painter. Painters always give me a whole new perspective on art, often noticing details that escape my critical eye. And what I learnt looking through Janise's eyes is just how daring it is to make such obvious references to the icons of the past. Arruda's references are multiple and range over centuries, from Romanticism (both British and German) through Monet to Rothko. And yet, his paintings are like none of the above. Still, he has the courage, not simply to quote Rothko, but to make paintings that, at first glance, are similar. I would add to this, Arruda has the courage to paint and paint small. These small quiet, sometimes meditative canvases are not exactly following the trends of today's art world. Which, through my eyes, makes them even more special. 

Lucas Arruda, Untitled (from the Deserto-Modelo series), 2022

Lucas Arruda's star is rising. After solo exhibitions at David Zwirner galleries around the world, and included in exhibitions at the Pinault collection, Parisians now have the opportunity to immerse themselves in another solo show at the Musée d'Orsay. In an age when the artists who attract attention are often working with new technologies, and dealing with hot political and social topics, Arruda paints pictures resembling landscapes or fully abstract, on very small canvases. But for Arruda, small is expansive. Small enables choice for Arruda. Small opens up possibilities for him to explore detail, to create surprises on the canvas, to obsessively go over and over and over. Often the brushes that he uses are so small that it can look as though he has scratched the surface, resembling hatching or a drypoint technique. From these markings, and a lot of scraping, pushing, and spreading of paint, light appears, waves on the ocean move, clouds burst, rain falls. 

Lucas Arruda, Untitled (from the Deserto-Modelo series), 2021

To call the Arruda's paintings landscapes feels misleading. They are only landscapes, seascapes, clearings in a densely vegetated forest, or cloudscapes because we see this in them, satisfying our desire for familiarity. They are more like spaces into which we are invited to immerse our visual imaginations. It is also clear that Arruda doesn't set out to paint a landscape—and has been quoted as saying as much. Rather, he paints, strips away, pushes around, works and reworks until light appears, somewhere unanticipated. These delicate paintings are thus also about light. They have been called melancholic, but to my eyes, they are quite hopeful. The light of the moon and the sun comes out of clouds, splashes over waves, emanates from the canvas, as though it has been pulled out of the depths of the painting, found through a meticulous, painstaking going over and over. 

Lucas Arruda, Untitled (from the Deserto-Modelo series), 2023

In order to see the radiance of these works, it's important to stand back and watch the pictures glow. Their luminosity is no doubt helped by the grey walls and the lighting at the Musée d'Orsay, like beacons of light pulling us towards them.  In one of the most exquisite paintings, Arruda's process finds a small moon in the ocean, a gesture of white paint, confusing the time in an already timeless place. A moon in the day light? A reflection of the sun behind clouds? A luminescence emerging from deep in the ocean? It's impossible to say. All we know is that there is something mysterious, something not quite of our world illuminating the one within the frame,

Lucas Arruda, Qu'importe le paysage @ Musée d'Orsay
Installation View

Arruda's horizons are always low, allowing more space for the clouds, air, light. Often they look to be etched, scratched, stripped where the paint moves horizontally, in a direction at odds with the paint covering the rest of the canvas. The horizon can be barely distinguishable, but it is always there, powerful and defined because it is horizontal. In addition, the air above moves to a different rhythm as well as a different direction from what we see as the water below. On exiting the rooms filled with nineteenth-century French painting, I was struck by the resonance of Arruda's graceful canvases with Courbet's blustering Stormy Sea (1870). While the mood and temperature of Courbet's painting bears no resemblance to Arruda's, the horizon line, fast and firm, going nowhere, is identical. The connections to Monet's light-filled canvases can also be appreciated from certain vantage points inside the Arruda exhibition. The resonances are not only seen in the emergence of light through paint, and the movement of paint as light, but the navigation of the horizontal and vertical, as well as the different paths paint takes around a canvas within these lines. Arruda's work might be filled with references, but he is an artist who has the confidence to do what comes to him, free of influence.