Lucas Arruda’s Untitled, belongs to the artist’s critically acclaimed body of seascape paintings; meditative, quasi-abstract compositions that blur the line between landscape and inner vision. Rich in painterly intensity and conceptual depth, Arruda draws upon the pictorial traditions of German Romanticism and Luminist painting while resisting the impulse to narrate or describe. Instead, Untitled operates as a space of perceptual and emotional contemplation, anchored in the motif of the horizon, yet untethered from specific geography or temporal context. Executed in 2012-13, the present work marries sea with sky and the real with the imagined, embodying a highly idealised seascape at the cusp of dawn or dusk. The artist describes his keen interest in the cyclical interplay of light throughout the day: “I started thinking about a narrative, for instance that passage between dawn and dusk, and created a sequence that examined those changes. I became really interested in that moment when it becomes completely dark before daybreak, that moment when you feel lost and disoriented. It’s really an attempt to measure the body’s relationship with different times of day, but without a human presence” (The artist quoted in Angeria Rigamonti di Cutò, “Lucas Arruda: The only reason to call my works landscapes is cultural,” Studio International, September 2017, online.)

Structured around a simplified binary of land and sky, or, more accurately, material and immaterial space, the present work is a beacon of the sublime. Arruda builds the lower half of the composition through deliberate, horizontal applications of dense, worked impasto, a painterly gesture that provides a grounded and tactile base. In contrast, the upper portion opens into a softly graduated atmosphere, rendered in a muted palette of pathetic fallacy. Vertical strokes of light rise subtly through the fog-like expanse, suggesting a veil or scrim rather than a sky, and inviting reflection on painting’s potential to evoke metaphysical or spiritual experience. The dialogue between these two registers – the weight of paint below and the evanescence above – suggests not so much a horizon as a point of collapse between states.

While the artist’s practice is rooted in landscape, Arruda is not concerned with representation or memory in any literal sense. His seascapes are not views but constructs; repetitive, serial explorations of a fixed compositional archetype. In this way, his practice enters into dialogue with the ontological questions of modernist abstraction. This emphasis on mood and perception links his work not only to the tradition of Turner and Friedrich but to Morandi’s constrained yet transcendent still lifes, and to the luminous intensity of Rothko’s colour fields, with which Arruda shares a preoccupation with the emotive power of light.

Arruda’s critical reception in recent years has been remarkable, with major solo exhibitions at institutions such as the Fridericianum in Kassel (2019) and the Fundação Iberê Camargo in São Paulo (2021). His inclusion in important international group exhibitions – including Natureculture at the Fondation Beyeler in Basel and Particularities at the X Museum in Beijing – has positioned Arruda at the forefront of a new generation of Latin American painters reconfiguring the language of abstraction for a contemporary audience. Works by Arruda are now held in several leading institutional collections, including the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.

Untitled exemplifies the quiet radicalism at the heart of Arruda’s practice: it is a painting that resists spectacle, favouring introspection; it offers not a depiction of the world, but a distilled visual grammar capable of producing affect, reflection, and atmosphere. In its refusal to name or locate itself, it becomes a site of imaginative possibility; an image of light emerging through darkness, evoking memory without narrative and presence without form.