Lucas Arruda

Lucas Arruda (born 1983, São Paulo, Brazil) is a Brazilian artist who lives and works in São Paulo. He received his Bachelor of Fine Arts from Faculdade Santa Marcelina in São Paulo in 2009. Although painting is central to his practice, his work also encompasses prints, light installations, slide projections, and film. Arruda has developed an extensive body of work around landscape and seascape, while avoiding direct reference to identifiable places. Instead, his works evoke imaginary landscapes through the study of light, atmosphere, memory, and perception, moving between figuration and abstraction. Since the mid-2000s, Arruda has developed the ongoing series *Deserto-Modelo*, a title borrowed from the Brazilian poet João Cabral de Melo Neto. The series consists primarily of small-format paintings whose suggested horizons, atmospheric fields, and subtle variations of light produce landscapes that are not based on observed topographies. As the Fridericianum has noted, Arruda is less concerned with depicting particular locations than with the thoughts and memories that landscapes and seascapes evoke, and with translating their associated lighting conditions, atmospheres, and emotions into imaginary images. The paintings can therefore move between the recognition of landscape and a high degree of abstraction, creating spaces for sustained attention and contemplation. Arruda’s practice has been presented internationally in solo exhibitions at institutions and galleries including Fridericianum, Kassel, in 2019; the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Madrid, in 2023; and, in 2025, the Musée d’Orsay in Paris and Carré d’Art – Musée d’art contemporain de Nîmes. His 2025 Musée d’Orsay exhibition, *Qu’importe le paysage*, was the artist’s first monographic exhibition at a French museum and brought approximately thirty of his paintings into dialogue with works from the museum’s Impressionist collection. The exhibition examined the relationship between Arruda’s treatment of landscape and the history of landscape painting, particularly through the changing representation of light. His work has also been included in major institutional exhibitions at the Fondation Beyeler in Basel, Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection in Paris, MASP in São Paulo, Palais de Tokyo in Paris, Punta della Dogana in Venice, and other international institutions. The Fondation Beyeler holds a substantial group of works from the *Deserto-Modelo* series in its collection, while the Musée national d’art moderne – Centre Pompidou holds several paintings from the series. These institutional holdings reflect the importance of Arruda’s sustained investigation of landscape, light, materiality, and perception within contemporary painting. Through the repetition and subtle variation of motifs, Arruda treats landscape less as a record of a specific place than as a field in which light, atmosphere, memory, and imagination can be brought together. His paintings maintain a productive tension between recognition and abstraction, inviting the viewer to consider landscape as both an image and a perceptual experience.