Lucas Arruda: Qu'importe Le Paysage - (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

Celebrating Lucas Arruda's landmark exhibition at the Musée d'Orsay, this captivating catalogue showcases his luminous landscapes in the compelling context of the museum's collection.

Brazilian painter Lucas Arruda creates landscapes that hover between the real and the imagined. For more than fifteen years, his ongoing Deserto-Modelo series of intimate, small-format paintings has explored light as a central, shaping force. "It is light that guides my painting," Arruda explains, "creating intensity and giving rise to spaces that are neither abstract nor figurative." While his focus on atmosphere and perception recalls impressionist painters, Arruda does not work from plein air studies or photographs. Instead, his images emerge from memory and imagination--interior visions that feel both timeless and deeply personal.

This publication accompanies Lucas Arruda: Qu'importe le paysage, the artist's first major solo exhibition in France, which was held at the Musée d'Orsay in 2025. For the exhibition, Arruda selected works by nineteenth-century masters such as Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, and Alfred Sisley to appear alongside his own, opening a dialogue across centuries. An essay by the curator Nicolas Gausserand illuminates these connections, tracing the affinities between Arruda's contemporary practice and the impressionist legacy.

About the Author

Brazilian painter Lucas Arruda's (b. 1983) meditative compositions blur the lines between mnemonic and imaginative registers. His evocative landscapes are more a product of a state of mind than any particular locale. As he notes, "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."

Nicolas Gausserand is the adviser to the president at the Musée d'Orsay, Paris, and oversees international affairs and the contemporary program. Previously, he oversaw international relations and was the acting executive director of the American Friends of the Centre Pompidou, in Paris.