Lucas Arruda - Cahiers d' Art _ monograph

WITHOUT A PIER FERNANDA BRENNER “At this moment Giovanni Drago is sleeping in the third redoubt. He is smiling in his dreams. For the last time there come to him by night the sweet sights of a completely happy world. It is as well that he cannot see himself, as he will one day be there at the end of the road, standing on the shores of the leaden sea under a grey, monotonous sky. And around him there is not a house, not one human being, not a tree, not even a blade of grass. And so it has been since time immemorial.” Excerpt from The Tartar Steppe, by Dino Buzzati, trans. Stuart C. Hood1 Lucas Arruda has been painting uninhabited landscapes since 2010. This choice could nowadays easily be interpreted as a throwback, or a way of escaping the neuroses of our era. However, Arruda is far from being a Romantic in search of the sublime; he did not grow up by the sea, nor is he proposing a new take on wellworn conventions of a painting genre. Despite being concerned with the woes of our time and politically and critically engaging with his surroundings, his paintings do not yearn for something external to the dabs of paint he has been for years persistently depositing on the small canvases scattered around his studio. It is in there that Arruda handles with zeal – but not fuss – the matter that composes three types of image: a schematic seascape marked by the presence of a more or less defined horizon under different weather conditions; monochromes; or the entrance to a dense tropical forest. They are all presented from a frontal, faraway perspective. Together, Arruda’s paintings seem to constitute a large inventory of the incidence and refraction of light on the atmosphere. Beyond any sort of narrative concern, these images are in fact the result of his main activity: ‘handling clearings’ in masses of paint. Some lights are constructions, while others are removals. What we understand as the horizon, for instance, is made by 52 Untitled (from the Deserto-Modelo series), 2018 detail (see p. 61) removing some of the paint with the back of a brush. In turn, in his monochromatic paintings, the gas-like appearance of the surface is the result of a tireless process in which the artist applies layers of paint on the canvas trying to match the bare canvas’ original colour (the outcome from this process is always a mystery). His compositions are mostly in the margins of the day: at dawn, twilight or nocturnal, when things lose their edge. When seen in sequence, it is as if we were watching, in real time, the passing of the hours in a suspended space. Astronauts on board a space station watch the sun rising and setting 16 times every 24 hours, as the station circles Earth every 90 minutes. What happens to our body outside the circadian cycle,2 when variations of light and temperature no longer guide our everyday actions? In order to mitigate the effects of suspended space-time on the astronauts’ bodies whilst orbiting, NASA has created artificial light set-ups that simulate the passage of one day on Earth. LED lamps are used for different daily activities, such as eating, sleeping and working. Arruda always paints using artificial light, and light is his great concern and work tool. He creates his own meteorology, keeping his studio constantly illuminated. Like the artificial passing of daytime in the spacecraft, what happens on the canvas is entirely made 53 Nature and Abstraction, 2018 Installation view at Fondation Beyeler Photos by Kristien Daem 54 55 up. He does not paint from direct observation, nor does he use photos as references. However, we hold on to the thin line of figuration in his paintings in order to call them landscapes. And the experience triggered by their presence has a similar impact on us as an overcast day or a beautiful sunset. Outer space – as well as the desert – has a metaphysical dimension, onto which we can project anything. Keeping the due proportions, both inspire reverie rather than objective descriptions. The desert is essentially a territory of absence; it has no features. It is a place that offers so little to the body that there is almost no alternative but to turn inwards. Arruda gave the same title to all his exhibitions between 2011 and 2018: Deserto-Modelo.3 Taken from a poem by João Cabral de Melo Neto,4 the expression reiterates the equally existential and mathematical nature of his work. A clear structural bond connects Arruda’s essential ‘models’, that is, the presence of a schematic horizontal line (the shoreline in the seascapes, the interstice of bare canvas under the fog of colour in the monochromes and the flattened land at the entrance of a forest). Arruda’s images, like Cabral’s conceptual desert – or for that matter any desert in the world – do not welcome human presence, they are pure atmosphere. In this sense, his work seems to be the outcome of a silent gaze for which the desert is an unattainable escape. His ability to apprehend the feeling of time passing in arid geographies – away from watches and GPS – is even more apparent in his paintings on slides.5 Without the experience of the materiality of painting, Arruda’s environments are like hallucinated mirages. In these works, he incorporates the movement of a rotary projector and paints on the minuscule surface of 35mm slides with the help of sticks and extremely fine brushes simulating the passage of 4 days and 4 nights. Through this process of unveiling or completely covering the acetate or glass transparency with paint, Arruda investigates the effect of the continuous light emanating from the projector.6 Different hues and densities impact the room according to the rotation of the slides. As the night draws in, the whole room becomes dark. At daybreak, light gradually returns. The rhythmic changing of slides and the noise coming from the projector – which sounds like a metronome – takes us deep inside the images. Is the only presence allowed in these inhospitable environments that of the people observing them? I am not so sure. For me, there is always something intangible and self-enclosed in Arruda’s work, which is its greatest virtue. The Brazilian poet and musician Arnaldo Antunes once wrote that Dorival Caymmi’s music7 ‘does not seem to be something made by people: it sounds like the sound of things themselves.’ He continues: ‘it is not an attempt, or a wish, it desires nothing, because it simply is.’ Arruda’s paintings seem to have a similar effect. The amount of work necessary to disguise his own presence is remarkable. His brushstrokes and scratches are apparent in several of his paintings, but I wouldn’t call them ‘gestural’. They are not reminiscent of De Kooning’s aim for self-expression or Pollock’s memory of movement. His canvases are certainly loaded with psychological matter and have a clear spiritual charge, but those are not reliable cues for interpretation either. The artist’s devotion to monochromes could be satisfactorily compared to Ad Reihardt’s later works, whose austere and radical ‘ultimate paintings’ challenge an interpretative approach to art through its search for an absolute presence. Just like Arruda’s mid-tones, Reinhardt’s black nuances are only revealed to a meditative, completely focused gaze, similarly to the subtle and spiritual colour variations in Agnes Martin, an artist often cited by Arruda as a reference. Her works – at once tranquil, joyous and transcendent – were inspired by her hermetic life, the desert landscape, and the Taoist ideals of balance and harmony she espoused. The young Brazilian artist’s work might evoke something similar, and this is why they are perverse. Their apparent claim for presence is elusive. Unlike Martin’s soothing meditations, Arruda’s horizons never settle. His work seems to embody the treacherous transience of tropical weather. Despite these clear nods to several moments within the tradition of painting – from the metaphysical legacy of USA’s abstract painting to John Constable’s inventory of clouds, from Armando Reverón’s mysterious treatment of light to On Kawara’s obsessive present8 –Arruda’s work does not entirely subscribe to any specific modern or post-modern painting tradition (perhaps this is due to the fact that he is a painter from the ‘new world’ for whom Deserto-Modelo as above, so below, 2016 Mendes Wood DM, São Paulo, Brazil Photos by Everton Ballardin 56 57 Deserto-Modelo, 2014 Installation view at Mendes Wood DM, São Paulo, Brazil the history of Western painting weights differently – however, this idea would merit its own essay). In his own arsenal of references, a historical boxing match coexists with classical paintings and Brazilian naïf masters. Luiz Gonzaga’s song Assum Preto – which describes the sad fortune of a bird who only sings in tune if its eyes are pierced – informs his painting as much as a shiny surface of alabaster glass randomly spotted at the Calouste Gulbenkian Collection in Lisbon, or a mythological character from Brazilian folk called Curupira: a trickster whose comings and goings protect the forest against human hazards, and who the artist often cites when talking about his pristine forest paintings. In my attempt to find the best way to describe the feeling I have when looking at Arruda’s paintings – or perhaps understanding his multi-layered connection to maritime landscapes – it is no accident that Caymmi’s music comes to mind. Caymmi, a master of Brazilian song writing, managed to vertiginously transform into words – in a way I would never be capable of – that which I have previously called ‘intangible’ while describing Arruda’s work: the inexorable mystery of what exists between the sky and the deep blue sea. In his essay ‘The Beach, A Fantasy’, anthropologist Michael Taussig9 describes a conversation he had with a lighthouse keeper in the north of Spain. While they were talking, she lifted her fingers at eye level in order to measure the distance between the sun and the horizon. She then explained her peculiar arithmetic: if between the sinking sun and the sea line there is room for only two fingers, fifteen minutes later there is room for only one finger. With this, she concluded it was time to stop talking as she had only half an hour left to light her lighthouse. This calculated gesture, nostalgically described by Taussig, is perhaps one of the last vestiges of human presence in this type of occupation, as today, the great majority of lighthouses are automated and have dispensed with human intervention. By totally refusing presence – ours, his own or his time’s – Arruda’s paintings preserve the extemporaneous condition of the shoreline. His work provides a new look into things that are disappearing and that cannot be grasped through language, calling for the experience of contemplation itself. Without any sort of earthly references we are left with only the floating proportion of the lines between sky and sea, so aptly described by the lighthouse keeper in Taussig’s text. Always drawing on this sequence of blank days, Arruda’s work is unfettered by the dogmas of modernity. His paintings have no judgement, they do not identify with progress, let alone with the overvaluing of the future. His sea is an ‘inside sea’: it is immanent. Lucas Arruda does not look at what he paints, but what he paints is perhaps the substrate of everything he intensely observes. 1 Arruda mentioned Buzzati’s seminal novel as an important reference text in one of the conversations that culminated in this text. 2 Period of approximately 24 hours, which the biological cycle of almost every living being is based on. It is mainly influenced by variations in light, temperature, tides and winds between night and day. In: Power of Light. https://science.nasa.gov/news-articles/the-power-of-light Accessed on 05 July, 2018. 3 Arruda has never translated this title, which in English means something like ‘prototype desert’. 4 João Cabral de Melo Neto, (1920- 1999), Brazilian modernist poet and diplomat, and the leading voice of the so-called ‘Generation of 45’, a group of poets known for their austere style. 5 Untitled from the series Deserto-Modelo, 2017. Projection, paint on eighty-one (81) acetate slides, 13:20 min (loop), colour. Exhibited in several spaces such as Fondation Beyeler in Basel, Pivô in São Paulo and the galleries Mendes Wood DM and David Zwirner. 6 This work closely surveys the relationship between light and colour pigment, which is further developed in the ‘light installations’ he has been working on since 2015. In this works, Arruda typically creates two symmetrical rectangles with two different shades of white: one of them is outlined by the light from a slide projector, or by a reflector linked to a timer. The other is painted directly on the wall. The ambient light oscillates according to the light setting: if the light is stable, the distinction between the two shades is clear; when the light intensity increases, one rectangle fades and the other is highlighted; when there is less light, the process is inverted. The perception of this interchangeable composition is perhaps the essence of Arruda’s research. 7 Arnaldo Antunes. ‘Dorival Caymmi’, in: João Bandeira (org.) 40-Escritos (São Paulo: Iluminuras, 2000), 24. 8 In 2017, Mendes Wood DM Gallery exhibited Lucas Arruda alongside On Kawara’s long-running series Today (1966–2013). This curatorial proposal contributed to highlighting Arruda’s commitment to the conceptual issue of the passage of time. The improbable pairing of dates in Kawara and Arruda’s multi-layered horizons show how these two artists obsessively and methodically record the passage of time, which I called an ‘inventory of blank days’, in Arruda’s case. 9 Michael Taussig. ‘The Beach, a Fantasy’. In: Walter Benjamin’s Grave (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). Photo Edouard Fraipont 58 59