Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic In the hip São Paulo district of Pinheiros, there was one specific street that artist Lucas Arruda had in mind for his home. So much so that he would walk through this quiet and leafy corner of the Brazilian city every day, keeping an eye out for “for sale” signs. When he was away, he asked his studio assistant, Juliana, to keep up the vigil. “Then one day when I was in Paris she called to tell me about a house,” he recalls. “I came straight back to Brazil and just fell in love with it.” Arruda describes the 1950s building as “a Modernist house, not designed by an important architect, but someone, for sure, who had a good vision”. For the 41-year-old artist, who has just opened a show at Paris’s Musée d’Orsay, São Paulo’s mid-century architecture is a passion. He highlights designs by architects from the Escola Paulista de Arquitetura (São Paulo School), such as Vilanova Artigas and Paulo Mendes da Rocha, in the neighbourhood of Higienópolis; the 1950 cantilevered Glass House of Lina Bo Bardi is a favourite. But everyday properties from this era, he says, “are becoming more and more rare. Little by little, they are disappearing, so it’s quite special to have found a house from that time. There are lots of details I love — the glass tiles, the terrazzo.”Since moving here five years ago, Arruda has created a place of retreat for himself and Una — the stray dog he found in Sertão do Una, an area of rainforest in the north of São Paulo state, around the same time as he found the house. “Sometimes when I’m here, I don’t feel like I’m in São Paulo,” he says. “There’s more air; there is less noise.”He has recreated something of the jungle atmosphere, with lush gardens at both sides of the house and plants creeping over windows and balconiesIt’s a space that in many ways echoes the ethereal paintings he has been creating since the early 2010s: small and intimate oil paintings, often only 30cm wide, infused with light and a sense of calm. Part figurative, part abstract, and wrought in a softly muted palette, they appear to show cloudy skies, moody bodies of water and verdant landscapes. Yet, says Arruda, they are visualisations of emotion and memory. “I live in the city, but I don’t paint the city,” he says. “São Paulo is very dynamic, but it’s not a pretty city. You never see the horizon, only the skyline. It’s funny to think, although I will never know the answer, if I was not living here whether I would be painting the same thing.” Arruda’s work has been exhibited in São Paulo with Mendes Wood gallery, and in London, Paris and New York with David Zwirner. Last year, his paintings were shown at Daitoku-ji Ōbai-in, a Zen Buddhist temple in Kyoto, Japan. This month they will be the subject of two museum shows in France. At the Musée d’Orsay, Arruda is the first artist from the southern hemisphere to have a solo show. His dreamily atmospheric paintings will hang alongside impressionist masterpieces from the museum’s collection: Monet, Courbet, Pissarro, Sisley. At the Carré d’Art in Nîmes, a retrospective (opening on April 30) will span painting as well as film and multimedia installation. It’s a series of events that Arruda, dressed in jeans and a white T-shirt, admits to feeling “a bit insecure, a bit nervous, a bit anxious” about. Arruda grew up in São Paulo, in the bohemian Pinheiros neighbourhood of Vila Madalena. His mother, a history teacher, and his father, a journalist, met through the Workers Party and Arruda was encouraged to be creative from a young age. By the time he was a teenager, he was already painting daily. A longtime source of inspiration has been the northern coast of São Paulo state, three hours from the city. “My father and his husband always had a small house inside the rainforest, close to the beach at Ubatuba,” he says. “It’s there that I get a lot of visual inspiration. I bring sketchbooks, and even canvas and paint; I take in the atmosphere and bring it back to the studio.” At home, he has recreated something of the jungle atmosphere, with lush gardens at both sides of the house and plants creeping over windows and balconies. At the front, what was a four-car garage has become an oasis of mostly local Brazilian species: palms, ferns, banana, mango and Cecropia trees. “I think the garden is the most special thing we built; it’s created a more contemplative, meditative environment,” says Arruda. He points to a pau-formiga tree — “I planted that, and just look how big it is in just five years!” A dense curtain of trepadeira (an abundant native climbing vine), meanwhile, hides the entrance to a home studio — an adjunct to his main work space in central São Paulo. “The studio of my house is very important because, for me, the best time to work is during the night,” he says. “During the day I can work on things in a more mechanical way, but somehow, the creative moments are during the night. My routine is to start painting at 8pm or 9pm, then by midnight, 1am, it’s the best time — the moment when the painting flows.” The house maintains many of its original features — including wood-panelled walls and a staircase with looping brass banisters. Much of the furniture is also Brazilian mid-century design: the dining table is by Carlo Hauner; there’s a sofa by Joaquim Tenreiro and an armchair by Zanini de Zanine; in a reading nook next to the garden, a low and laid-back lounge chair is the Mole by Sergio Rodrigues — “a very classical chair in Brazil”. In between are more rustic, folk pieces — benches, objects, paintings and a carranca: “a kind of monster that they had at the front of boats to scare the other monsters in the sea”, says Arruda, of the carved wooden creature. “It’s a very good one, by a guy called Mestre Guarany, from Bahia. He pays attention to small details like the teeth — they are so well done.” Of the numerous artworks in his home, he adds: “Most of them are Brazilian, most of them are paintings, and most of them are folk art.” They include works by self-taught painters such as José Antonio da Silva and Júlio Martins — artists whose naive style is “sort of trendy right now”, he says; Brazilian Modernism by the likes of Paulo Pasta and Mira Schendel; and some by friends and those also represented by gallery Mendes Wood, from 64-year-old Solange Pessoa to 27-year-old Paula Siebra. “There are many! I cannot put everything on the walls,” he says of the collection. Some were bought from galleries, others from the city’s flea markets. “The best market right now is in Bixiga,” says Arruda. “I found this painting there.” He points out a scene of people in procession. “I don’t even know who it’s by but I love it. I love some tacky things, too,” he smiles. “Like this lamp in the shape of a snake — it came from a bar I had a long time ago.” The city centre Lourdes bar that Arruda ran from 2016 to 2018 hosted underground parties, attracting an arty crowd. These days, however, he has another project. When his father sold his rainforest home, Arruda sought out his own place nearby and found a former fisherman’s house near Santiago beach. “It’s very pretty, a bit crooked — when it rains, it rains a bit inside too — but there is a lot of soul in this house,” he says. “It’s a very different situation from the jungle, it has a different identity, a different energy, it’s less isolated. But I can spend a day going to the waterfalls — and the beach is less humid than the jungle, so it’s easier to stay there and work without growing mushrooms on your canvas.”Lucas Arruda ‘Qu’importe le paysage’ is at the Musée d’Orsay until July 20Find out about our latest stories first — follow @ft_houseandhome on Instagram
