O jovem pintor brasileiro Lucas Arruda virou notícia no The New York Times. Ele é de São Paulo, tem 28 anos, é filho do meu companheiro, e sua mostra de pinturas a óleo na I 20 Gallery, no Chelsea, em Manhattan acaba de ser citada por Ken Johnson no The New York Times. Nada como tirar proveito na fama dos outros, não é não? Principalmente quando os tais "outros" são tão próximos dos meus rudimentos de paternidade.
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"Ele é, ao que parece, genuinamente compelido pela idéia de captura de experiência vivida no pintar. Parte do que está metaforicamente na margem exterior da civilização e perscrutando o cosmos desconhecido e incognoscível talvez. É a emoção do sublime"
"Lucas Arruda, of São Paulo, Brazil, is only 28, but his small, beguiling land and seascape paintings look as if they were made 150 years ago by a follower of Whistler. Working along the border between abstraction and representation on laptop and smaller-size canvases Mr. Arruda paints pictures of flat land, water and expansive, glowing skies minimally interrupted by low rocks and forested islands. He mostly uses severely muted colors and applies paint in a variety of ways: thick, thin and brushy, sometimes scratching in with the wrong end of the brush. At the same time as he asserts the matter-of-fact physicality of the medium, he creates luminous space. Many pictures suggest views of beaches at low tide on foggy mornings; others evoke twilight. You see through the eyes of the lonesome Romantic wanderer who haunts the paintings of artists like Caspar David Friedrich and Edward Hopper.
Mr. Arruda is not naïve, and neither is he a conservative revivalist of Modernist tradition. Nor is he a Postmodernist playing clever games with picturesque clichés. He is, it seems, genuinely compelled by the idea of capturing lived experience in paint. Part of that is being metaphorically on the outer fringe of civilization and peering into the unknown and perhaps unknowable cosmos. It is the thrill of the sublime. The other part is the strange and fascinating fact that mere colored paste smeared on fabric in the right way can evoke infinity without surrendering its own immediately sensual finitude."
