A dreamlike glow emanates from muted pastel hues emerging from Lucas Arruda’s thick impasto brushwork as if from behind a thick fog. In Untitled, paint swirls around the canvas, blending wisps of cloud into stretches of sea, capturing the unrelenting violence of nature within this seemingly calm scene. Within the confines of this intimately sized canvas, Arruda captures the contradictory tranquillity and energy contained within the natural landscape while simultaneously foregrounding the physicality of paint and materiality of canvas. The canvas’ small scale seems at odds with this expansive natural scene which is traditionally experienced on a monumental scale, oscillating the viewer between familiarity and awe. “It’s the counterpoint that I like”, Arruda explains, “the tension of the wide spaces to the small canvases, and also, the more you get near them, the less you can access them” (Lucas Arruda cited in: Lucy Rees, ‘Lucas Arruda’s Dreamy Landscapes Go on View at David Zwirner’, Galerie Magazine, 10 October 2019, online).

Edging toward abstraction, Untitled is anchored by a faint horizon line hovering just above the bottom of the canvas, creating the illusion of depth and distance. Arruda does not take landscape explicitly as his reference – his landscapes never have specific geographical referents – but instead they contemplate our capacity to live through the mediation of light and gaze. At once familiar and imaginary, Untitled is constructed from the hive of the artist’s lived experience, containing within its’ depths as vast as the recesses of his memory. The process of memory construction and reconstruction is activated with each gaze as fields of colour translate to a temporal landscape. Arruda reflects that "the only reason to call my works landscapes is cultural – it’s simply that viewers automatically register my format as a landscape, although none of the images can be traced to a geographic location. It's the idea of landscape as a structure, rather than a real place" (Lucas Arruda cited in: Angeria Rigamonti di Cutò, ‘Lucas Arruda: “The only reason to call my works landscapes is cultural'", Studio International, 19 September 2017, online).

In its preoccupation with landscape, whether as a structure or a subject, Arruda recalls the genre’s art historical associations with the Romantic sublime. In the way Arruda captures infinity in smeared pigment on paper, there is the thrill and terror of the unknowable cosmos which captivated landscape painters of the nineteenth century. The viewer is made to see nature through the eyes of artists like Caspar David Friedrich and John Constable and experience the exhilaration of the sublime. Nevertheless, Arruda goes beyond capturing the majesty of the landscape in aching detail and exactitude, exploring instead the caverns and valleys of the human psyche. “I don’t think of myself as a landscape painter. It’s common to view my work through the lens of the sublime, but it’s more complex than that. My work is informed at a technical level by certain landscape painting, in the use of color and brushwork for example, or Constable’s clouds, which are the best in that tradition. But those painters were observing nature" (Lucas Arruda cited in: Ibid.).

With Untitled, Arruda goes beyond the traditional boundaries of landscape and truth to nature defined by the canon of art history to examine complex contemporary mental states. Contained within agitated strokes of pale pigment, Arruda captures the tension which defines the zeitgeist.