Assum Preto is Arruda’s first monothematic exhibition on forests, showing more than twenty paintings created over the last ten years. The paintings in the exhibition date from 2013 to 2022 and include a number of works that have never been shown before. These pieces come from international museums, foundations and private collections, as well as the Sandretto Re Rebaudengo collection itself.
Hans Ulrich Obrist, curator of the exhibition, explains that these works “will open up unexpected experiences, giving rise to narratives and encounters that will offer visitors an intensely playful experience. No two visits to this complex and stimulating exhibition will be the same. Arruda’s research is developed around landscape, and this exhibition proposes a live experience that operates through the mediation of light and the gaze.”
In Arruda’s paintings, slide projections and light installations, landscapes are framed in a process of construction and reconstruction of memory that hovers between abstraction and figuration, between apparition and emptiness. Thus he creates an atmosphere that is charged with visual and metaphysical questions about heaven and earth, the ethereal and the solid, imagination and reality.
