Carré d’art

Event organised as part of the Saison du Brésil en France 2025

From April 30 to October 5, 2025

LUCAS ARRUDA : DESERTO-MODELO

This major retrospective of works by Lucas Arruda features paintings, films and installations from different periods of his career, some of which have been produced specifically for the occasion. The exhibition, which will occupy the entire floor of the temporary spaces, will present the different aspects of his practice. Arruda is fundamentally interested in landscape, human thought and experimenting with our capacity to live through the mediation of light and the gaze. His landscapes exist at the point of tension between abstraction and figuration, between appearance and emptiness.

Arruda has used the phrase Deserto-Modelo-a line from the poems of João Cabral de Melo Neto-to unite these seemingly disparate elements of his practice, invoking it as the title of several of his exhibitions as well as individual paintings, as if to signify that the same process, the same quest, never ceases to be pursued. The desert is a place out of time, where we can experience ourselves, make an inner journey. The painting is there to take us, as it were, beyond the visible. With each glance, experiences are delimited in a process of construction and reconstruction of memory, as if the formulation of color fields were touching the immaterial body of temporal landscapes and lived sensations. What seems most important is the relationship of the colors to each other, rather than the colors themselves.

Faced with Arruda’s paintings, one might think of the Impressionists, Turner, the history of landscape painting in Brazil or Giorgio Morandi. Like Morandi, he always uses the same structure, tending towards abstraction and a metaphysical dimension. The absence of human figures invites introspection and meditation, while avoiding any narrative. Technically, his work is a question of subtracting and adding matter. In the monochromes, layers of paint are superimposed on a prepared canvas, with the light coming from behind. In the seascapes, the paint is subtracted with a fine brush, leaving behind very thin layers of color and light.

The exhibition will echo a simultaneous presentation at the Musée d’Orsay (Qu’importe le paysage exhibition, April 8 – July 20, 2025), in the Impressionist Gallery (level 5), where Lucas Arruda’s works will be in dialogue with Monet’s paintings, in a highly complementary relationship.

IVENS MACHADO

Ivens Machado (1942-2015) belongs to a generation of artists who became visible in the 1970s, during the rise of the dictatorial regime in Brazil.

The exhibition presents a selection of video and photographic works documenting the artist’s performances during this period, in which he used the body and the performative gesture to express social tensions. Issues of violence, repression and sexuality are addressed, often very explicitly. The artist explored these themes throughout his life, using a variety of materials.

He then consolidated his sculptural practice by incorporating cement, bricks, wood and iron, all materials used in construction. All these forms suggest the presence of bodies. They establish relationships between physicality and construction, architecture and ruins, sometimes in provocative ways. As in his performances, the body and sensuality are also essential dimensions in the elaboration of sculptural forms.

Interestingly, his practice is based on the subversion of conventional sculpture, making him one of the undisputed leaders of his generation of sculptors in Brazil, who has influenced many young artists.

This exhibition fits in perfectly with Carré d’Art’s programming, which recently welcomed Nairy Baghramian and Tarik Kiswanson, two artists who question the practice of sculpture in a political field, in a relationship to the body and to performance. It’s a way of reinterpreting Ivens Machado’s work in a Brazilian and international context.

!!! Please note that some of the images in the videos may shock young audiences !!!

These exhibitions are part of the Rencontres d’Arles program as part of the Grand Arles Express.

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