On the radio, environmental disasters are announced, the population is on alert, deforestation. These noises are signs of the anthropogenic phase we are in. Although this is not new, in light of the still uncertain peak of the global crisis, we are reminded of the consequences of territorial disputes and their impacts on ecosystems, especially regarding the transformations and exhaustion of Brazilian lands.
Regardless of our future, we will remember the Carioca mountains in the melodies of Villa-Lobos, the stalagmites echoing in the compositions of Hermeto Pascoal, the rural paths of Agostinho Batista de Freitas, and the urbanization seen through the windows of Djanira da Motta e Silva. Through these representations, experienced by their interlocutors, we may understand them as devices to prevent the collective forgetting of these territorialities. But how can we recover the sensations that extinct landscapes once brought?
During the pandemic, Lucas Rubly (São Paulo, 1991) began a series of paintings in which sandcastles, woods, lakes, flowers, and abstract forms emerge as refuges, gentle and welcoming places. The themes trace the vestiges of his memory: the sandcastles remind him of the precarious house where he grew up, in the Vila Ivone neighborhood, in the East Zone of São Paulo, built by his great-grandfather and now on the verge of collapsing. The houses without doors or windows, always distant, hold the landscapes of childhood trips to Monte Verde, when an ideal of family still seemed possible; the flowers in vases refer to the containment of the wild, a symptom of a logic of violence against the natural. More recently, abstraction relieved him from the previous figuration—an alleviation that came after an intense period of confinement and production.
To conceive environments external to the domestic, Rubly blended old photographs with paintings by other artists. He adapted to contemporary technological resources, appropriating artificial intelligence as a creative tool, including in his practice the creation of an image bank to be processed, filtered into up to three images, edited in Photoshop, and finally painted. Even after the imposed isolation, the artist maintained this research process in his production: from nonexistent representations constructed by the excess of images to the recreation of his own landscapes.
“The attempt to remember is not an attempt to relive. Memory is always an imperfect construction, and this imperfection is also in the supports, in the preparation of the canvas, in the drawing, in the way of showing,” says Rubly. Therefore, his paintings—sometimes made on cotton canvases, other times painted directly on wood—are small and intimate in scale, comfortable for eyes accustomed to reading screens of tablets and cell phones. The square format, uncommon in traditional painting, may reflect the visual repertoire of social media. When displaying the series on the wall, he often shuffles them like a memory game, with fragments of themes that, when related, form crossed narratives—an element characteristic of mass media. The arrangement, combined with the misaligned compositions, gives rhythm to the reading of the works, like a musical score welcoming the visitor from external noises.
The paintings, in temporal and spatial transits, allow revisiting landscapes shaped by memory and technology while simultaneously despersonalizing them. Morandi, Volpi, Lorenzato, Vila Ivone, Monte Verde, albums, and family scenes are mixed with images from algorithms to become personal references when listed. Perhaps an advertisement for vases or even a work by Aurelino; each gaze recognizes something familiar, absorbed in the flow of everyday life.
Similar to the composition of the haiki—a concise poem about simple themes that traverses times, places, and artistic movements without losing its connection to nature and everyday rhythm—Lucas Rubly’s work reveals the layers of these appropriations and reformulations, displacing them from their original contexts.
“in what I feel,
yes a little bit of paper
a lot of tape
and a touch of paint
I take this world
knock it against the head
who knows, maybe I forget
who knows, maybe it finally
haiki of the world
haiki of me
(…)
In the mirror
glimpsed
the color of the dream
from Yesterday
(…)”
Paulo Leminski, Ideolágrimas (1983), poem from the book Caprichos e relaxos.
Just as the lyrical self sees itself in the poem and captures the “world” with few words, Lucas Rubly constructs metonymies of his solitude. Not by chance, Leminski’s haiki titles his first solo exhibition in 2024 at Galeria Verve, bridging the past and present while highlighting the relationship between the subjective process of creation and the fragments of a collective consciousness.
