Lucas Arruda: Deserto-Modelo
Texts by Will Chancellor and Barry Schwabsky
The first comprehensive monograph on the work of Brazilian painter Lucas Arruda elucidates the artist’s intricate, meditative compositions.
Arruda has gained critical acclaim for atmospheric paintings that fluctuate between abstraction and figuration, imagination and reality. This monograph presents three groups of works loosely characterized as seascapes, jungles, and monochromes. Collectively titled Deserto-Modelo, they have an ephemeral, transient quality.
Arruda’s intimately sized paintings of seascapes and junglescapes are characterized by their subtle rendition of light. Painted from memory, they are devoid of specific reference points, instead achieving their variety through the depiction of atmospheric conditions. Verging on abstraction, the compositions are grounded by an ever-present, if sometimes faint, horizon line that offers a perception of distance. They appear at once familiar and imaginary. Through his often evocative and textured brushstrokes, Arruda foregrounds the materiality and physicality of paint, while also recalling his genres’ historical associations with the notion of the romantic sublime.
Alongside meticulous color plates and powerful details, author Will Chancellor offers a close reading of the work, raising questions about artifice, thresholds, and perception. Critic Barry Schwabsky unpacks the challenges posed by Arruda’s mysterious painted surfaces. As a whole, this book provides a detailed introduction to the work of a uniquely thoughtful and inventive artist.
Publisher: David Zwirner Books
Artists: Lucas Arruda
Contributors: Will Chancellor, Barry Schwabsky
Publication Date: September 2020
Binding: Hardcover
Dimensions: 8 1/4 × 10 3/4 in | 21 × 27.6 cm
Pages: 136
Reproductions: 100 color
ISBN: 9781644230411
Retail: $60 | £45 | €55
Status: Available
Lucas Arruda
Brazilian artist Lucas Arruda’s (b. 1983) landscapes and seascapes are characterized by their subtle rendition of light. Painted from memory, they are devoid of specific reference points, achieving instead their variety through the depiction of atmospheric conditions. Verging on abstraction, the compositions are grounded by an ever-present, if sometimes faint, horizon line that offers a perception of distance. Intimately sized, they appear at once familiar and imaginary. Through his often evocative and textured brushstrokes, Arruda foregrounds the materiality and physicality of paint, while also recalling his genres’ historical associations with the notion of the romantic sublime.
Will Chancellor
Will Chancellor is the author of the novel A Brave Man Seven Storeys Tall (2014) and is currently writing an alternate history of the Soviet space program titled The Meaning of Certain Dreams. His writing has appeared in Bookforum, Lit Hub, The New York Times Magazine, Interview, The White Review, Bomb, The New York Times, and The Brooklyn Rail. He recently introduced César Aira’s On Contemporary Art (2018) for David Zwirner Books’s ekphrasis series.
Barry Schwabsky
Barry Schwabsky is an art critic for The Nation and coeditor of international reviews for Artforum. He has published several books of criticism, of which the most recent are The Observer Effect: On Contemporary Painting (2019), Landscape Painting Now: From Pop Abstraction to New Romanticism (2019), and The Perpetual Guest: Art in the Unfinished Present (2016), as well as of poetry. He has taught at Goldsmiths College, Yale University, and the Maryland Institute College of Art, among others, and lives in New York.
