Lucas Arruda: Assum Preto

Walking through Assum Preto, Lucas Arruda’s current exhibition at David Zwirner, I was reminded of the composer Morton Feldman, a perceptive commentator on the visual arts, who once described his compositions as “time canvases.” Feldman sought an aural equivalent to the texture and scale of Abstract Expressionist paintings like those of Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman. To this end, late in his career, he began to explore subtleties of repetition and variation in chamber pieces as long as six hours—music, Feldman said, that did not “exist by way of time, in time or about time… but as time…time as an image… time undisturbed.”

“Time undisturbed” is an apt description for the thirty-nine paintings included in Assum Preto, which follow one another in a procession of motifs that recur without repeating. Sensations of temporality permeate these works—as portraits of light, like in Arruda’s seascapes; in the virtually inexhaustible optical depth of the larger abstracts; and in many of his jungle paintings, their surfaces ghostly and faded like an uncovered artifact—but it is a temporality without motion, time arrested. Ostensibly representational, Arruda’s work often verges on abstraction. In the seascapes, for example, there are no figures to narrativize the scene, nor any objects to establish a sense of internal scale. Clouds looming or departing, dense with pressure or suffused with light, tranquil or turbulent, always suspended over the merest suggestion of a horizon, become their own context, without external reference, suggesting no specific place.

Though the themes at the heart of Arruda’s paintings (time, light, memory) are as abstract and intangible as his seascapes, one of the most immediate impressions the objects themselves afford is of painterliness and materiality. Beckoned toward these works by their intimate size, one finds a surface so finely detailed that it becomes enveloping and immersive; the artist’s brushwork, commensurate with the proportions of the canvases, yields a sense of scale that far exceeds the physical size of the painting. Arruda’s characteristic mark making resembles that of an etching. The paint surface is scratched, hatched, and scored, with brush marks that appear to have removed pigment and revealed underlying colors. This technique creates a lambent, breathing surface. Often in the seascapes, in the absence of precise definition, it is mark-making alone that does the work of describing the wind and water.

Related to the seascapes are the large abstract paintings, each with a velvety, atmospheric field hovering upon the surface, painted in tones that closely match the dyed linen ground prominent along the bottom edge. Though these paintings bear a passing resemblance to earlier near-monochrome work by Rothko and Brice Marden, their combination of material flatness and seemingly infinite depth feels more photographic than painterly, a quality heightened by their subtle gradations of color and softly fading edges. Like Hiroshi Sugimoto’s long-exposure photographs of movie theaters, Arruda’s abstracts accumulate time in a still image, revealing themselves slowly, with layers of pigment becoming gradually more opaque and, at the same time, suggestive of ever deeper space.

In Zwirner’s first New York show of Arruda’s work nearly five years ago, seascapes predominated. A few jungle scenes were featured, and a set of large abstracts hung together in a gallery by themselves. There, the works appeared disparate, unrelated to one another. The current installation integrates these three types of paintings so that their various depths, tempos, and tonalities inform one another, and an overall emphasis on visual and tactile perception emerges. The three light installations in the east gallery, which contrast painted shades of off-white with projected light, further reveal the depth of Arruda’s interest in issues of perception and the edges of perceptibility.

The uncanny, universalizing quality of Arruda’s subjects has elicited contemplative responses from poets and philosophers in addition to art writers, with precedents in romanticist landscape and contemporary conceptual art offered as contextualization for his practice. But I find Arruda’s art largely enigmatic, outside tradition. The more I’ve tried to write, the further my words departed from my meditative experience of his work. The Cloud of Unknowing, the title of a medieval Catholic mystic text, comes to mind, as does another passage by Feldman, talking about Rothko and Rembrandt: “It’s very difficult for us to listen to something, or to look at something, outside of its style. We don’t know the skills that went into it… Until we’re reeducated not to think of art in terms of aesthetics or style, we really don’t know what it is.”