Lucas Arruda, the art of scratching

The first rooms are devoted to the landscape: sea horizons and/or jungles, forests. The commissioner and the artist wished to confront the periods from 2015 to 2025, thus demonstrating the perseverance, the application of an artist and at the same time of a permanent renewal in the face of a recurring “reason”. Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964) is not very far away … With one difference, the works of Lucas Arruda are much more alive and vibrant than his Italian elder. Where Morandi adds material, Arruda, he obviously proceeds from the pictorial surface, like a sculptor in front of his piece of marble, clay or wood. Arruda’s art is an art of scratching. Using dry brushes, it touches the surface of the table to remove the first layers from the pictorial epidermis. Thus, the white areas of its paintings are not an addition of material to sing the light, but on the contrary the skin of the canvas stretched on chassis. The Arruda method is remarkably illustrated by a light installation. A set of slides painted by scratch plunges the visitor both in a starry night evoking Vincent Van Gogh, as a dark and disturbing horizon at the William Turner. Where does this light that radiates paintings come from? From the reserve: where Arruda has removed all the material, the projector light can pierce. Ultimately, a video work, Uutral Corner) Presented for the first time in France, stages a boxing fight of incredible violence creating, using a remarkable montage, a story that leaves speechless.