- VeneKlasen Werner, Berlin - Private collection, Europe - Acquired from the above by the present owner

Deserto-Modelo, VeneKlasen Werner, Berlin, Germany (09/12/2014 - 10/1/2015)

“I don’t see myself as separate from nature, either when facing it out in the open or when inside the studio — I understand nature more like the flow of time and of life.” Lucas Arruda Characterized by their delicate allusions to light and ethereal horizon lines, Lucas Arruda’s paintings fluctuate between abstraction and figuration. Devoid of all points of reference, the artist’s Untitled (2014) materializes as a portal into uncharted territory. Seeking to discover a psychological dimension or state of mind suspended within his signature medium, Arruda’s canvases are charged with atmospheric conditions that engage further dichotomies between the sky and earth and the spiritual and physical realms. His intimately scaled works veer toward Rothko-esque abstraction but are always anchored by a faint horizon that offers both perception and distance creating a push and pull between composition and media. Born in São Paulo, Brazil in 1983, his artworks are included in the permanent collections of the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo; and the Rubell Family Collection, Miami. Having studied painting for most of his life, Arruda belongs to a new generation of Brazilian artists with the goal to reintroduce painting back to an art scene that has long been dominated by conceptual and video art. “By the time I got to college, I was already on a path towards painting, which was unusual in that context,” Arruda has explained. “I was part of a generation in Brazil that reclaimed painting in around 2005, almost as a statement, as if to say: why not painting? But I consider myself an artist who works with paint, rather than a painter. At the same time, whichever medium I chose to work in is informed by painting. Even my works that seem like classic oils on canvas are more like installations that happen to use the medium of paint.” Indeed, Arruda’s practice seems to echo the calm serenity of the Venezuelan painter, Armando Reverón. Considered one of the leading figures of 20th century Latin American art, Reverón is known for his impressionistic paintings of landscapes and nudes during the early half of the 1900s. And while Reverón became totally immersed within his own landscape — working out of a hut built of palm-fronds off the Caribbean coast and using brushes made of sticks and bones — Arruda has long sought to distance himself from the term “landscape painter.” “I don’t think of myself as a landscape painter,” the artist explains. “It’s common to view my work through the lens of the sublime, but it’s more complex than that. My work is informed at a technical level by certain landscape painting, in the use of color and brushwork for example, or Constable’s clouds, which are the best in that tradition. But those painters were observing nature.” "If anything,” Arruda continues, “I identify more with Morandi, in the sense that I always use the same structure – a landscape with a horizon line. There’s a combination of mathematical and metaphysical impulses in my work. In a way, the only reason to call my works landscapes is cultural: it’s simply that viewers automatically register my format as a landscape, although none of the images can be traced to a geographic location. It’s the idea of a landscape rather than a real place, perhaps in that sense there’s a similarity with the late Turners.” As the artist asserts, while there may be clear compositional ties to the Romantic landscapes that emerged out of Germany and England, with such notable painters as Caspar David Friedrich, Arruda unlike his forebears is not engaged directly in the landscape. Rather, the landscape emerges as an idea rather than a real place — a conduit for his painting practice. Seeking to foreground the materiality and physicality of paint, Arruda has stated that rather than nature, his studio practice is the backbone of his creative process. “I work surrounded by my references to art,” he explains, “my experiences with the world, and the way I relate to life. I don’t have a plan, fixed project, or perceived idea before the start of a new work, each painting shows me how to continue. Painting for me is like having a candle in the dark that allows you to see only what is close to you.”