Examining Myself and Others: Victor Arruda and Carroll Dunham

Curated by Dan Nadel
July 15 to September 21, 2024

Almeida & Dale
Rua Caconde, 152
São Paulo – SP
01425-010 Brazil

Victor Arruda and Carroll Dunham came of age in very different 1970s. Arruda critiqued the bourgeoisie in the 1970s and 1980s in Rio de Janeiro while the country was under a military dictatorship. Dunham was immersed in the conceptual art world of New York, trying to find a personal and procedural language. Both were liberated through looking at art, and sometimes ostensibly illicit material: Arruda has called himself and Dunham the children of Robert Crumb. A figure of artistic liberation for many, these artists included, Crumb’s comics offer permission for the creative impulse to take any form and push against aesthetic or moral boundaries. Additionally, the two artists share an omnivorous interest in art history, pulling inspiration from a heterogenous collection of sources from mannerist painting to surrealism to bathroom graffiti.

Arruda and Dunham both proceed with their paintings, in a way, innocently, making encounters between often naked humans that ostensibly stand in for the things we all do – looking, fucking, imagining, dancing, fighting – the building blocks for their work. Because each composition is a tightly controlled play of limbs and a few colors, the interpersonal action is always in focus. The bodies contort, gender become mysterious or pronounced, and in the tangle of flesh and spaces in between figures, an uncanny life appears.

Arruda builds this painted life with vernacular imagery drawn with an elastic line and exuberant blocks of color. His paintings are planned from drawings, constructed for maximum graphic communication about love and lust, power imbalances amidst the urban rich and poor, and the mental and emotional maps that dominate Brazilian life. These vignettes float in Arruda’s rich hues, as though across a film screen of his own making. Dunham breathes life into his canvases by improvising within rigorous compositional parameters, creating atmosphere in the skies and grounds, filling them, and their bodies, with his touch. His primordial scenes of cylindrical male figures wrestling for sport or in combat, posed and prone, and male and female figures frozen in coitus, are the stuff of our shared beginnings. They offer a grammar of basic human activity.

These are two artists from quite different perspectives and processes who strip away the niceties of everyday existence in order to reveal something basic about the way we humans relate to one another and our environments. In doing so, they offer a place to go to connect with the foundations of bodies and psyches.