Lucas Arruda: Qu'importe le paysage

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. The writer Christine Smallwood explores in a new essay how light figures in Arruda’s landscapes to create a sense of timelessness that has a magnetic effect on viewers.