From 1 February to 8 March, the Fundación Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Madrid, dedicated to the promotion of artists and their conception of cultural mediation to contextualise and socialise contemporary art, will host for the first time in Spain the exhibition Assum Preto, by the artist Lucas Arruda (Sao Paulo, 1983) at the Biblioteca del Ateneo de Madrid (Calle Paseo del Prado, 21).
The exhibition, comprising more than twenty paintings on the theme of forests, is curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, who will hold a conversation with the artist Lucas Arruda at the Ateneo de Madrid (by invitation) on the occasion of the opening, on Tuesday 31 January, and the film Untitled. Neutral Corner (2018) by Lucas Arruda, a work based on footage of the boxing match between Benny Paret and Emile Griffith that took place in 1962. In it, Paret was left in a coma and died ten days later. The piece, whose soundtrack is a mournful, elegiac composition by Icelandic cellist Hildur Guðnadóttir, combines images that oscillate between close-ups of legs in the ring with ropes across the screen.
In his work Lucas Arruda examines some of the contemporary states of mind and through his paintings, slide projections and light installations, his landscapes are situated between abstraction and figuration, between apparition and emptiness. With each gaze, experiences are demarcated in a process of construction and reconstruction of memory. Thus, Arruda places the viewer before atmospheres charged with both visual and metaphysical questions, between heaven and earth, the ethereal and the solid, imagination and reality.
The exhibition will be accompanied by the publication of a bilingual Spanish/English book to be presented on 21 February to coincide with the 42nd edition of ARCOmadrid. Renowned international authors will contribute to the publication, which will include a conversation between the artist and the curator.
