Lucas Arruda

I think light is what binds my works together as if I am constantly balancing light and shadow. – Lucas Arruda

Lucas Arruda focuses on the landscape genre, using an approach that explores complex mental states and our experience of light and perception rather than specific locations – obstinately thinking and experimenting with our capacity of living through the mediation of light and the gaze. Arruda’s scenery exists at the point of tension between abstraction and figuration, between apparition and emptiness. With each gaze, experiences are delineated through a process of constructing and reconstructing memories, as if the arrangement of color fields has interacted with intangible landscapes and felt sensations. As viewers move above and below horizon lines, atmospheres laden with visual and metaphysical questions unfold. Between sky and earth, the ethereal and solid, imagination and reality, meditative contemplation finds its routine while following an endless cycle of sublimation and deposition of matter.

Lucas Arruda (b. 1983, São Paulo, Brazil) lives and works in São Paulo.

Arruda has had solo exhibitions at Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Madrid (2023); Instituto Tomie Ohtake, São Paulo (2022); Fundação Iberê Camargo, Porto Alegre (2021); Pond Society, Shanghai (2020); Fridericianum, Kassel (2019); Cahiers d’Art, Paris (2018); Indipendenza, Rome (2016); Lulu, Mexico City (2015); Pivô, São Paulo (2015).

Additionally, his work has been included in institutional group exhibitions such as the Fondation Beyeler, Basel (2024); Dhaka Art Summit, Dhaka (2023); Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection, Paris (2023); Fondation Beyeler, Basel (2023); Museu de Arte Assis Chateaubriand (MASP), São Paulo (2022); Fondation Beyeler, Basel (2022); Pinault Collection | Le Fresnoy, Tourcoing (2022); Fondation Beyeler, Basel (2021); Dhaka Art Summit, Dhaka (2020); Fondation Beyeler, Basel (2020); Instituto Tomie Ohtake, São Paulo (2019); Punta della Dogana, Venice (2019); Fiorucci Art Trust, Stromboli (2019); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2019); Fondation Beyeler, Basel (2018); Couvent des Jacobins and Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rennes (2018); Coimbra Biennial of Contemporary Art (2017); Kunsthal KAdE, Amersfoort (2016); 1st Bienal Internacional de Asunción, Asunción (2015); La Réserve Paris, Paris (2013); Museo del Barrio, New York (2013); Pinacoteca de São Paulo, São Paulo (2012).