What Charles Darwin was to South American flora and fauna, Brazilian painter Lucas Arruda is to European painting. Discovering the light of the Impressionists and cataloging the warm surfaces of Giotto and Piero della Francesca, he returns to his studio to sort, examine, and meditate. With monk-like devotion, he repeats a limited set of motifs, conjuring small-scale paintings of breathtaking variety. For his first institutional exhibition in France, he will exhibit 34 of his works at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris amongst those of the colossi of French painting, such as Gustave Courbet, Théodore Rousseau, and Eugène Boudin. Sharing a space with Claude Monet’s series of Rouen Cathedral is particularly exciting for the artist.

‘I’m very happy that I will be with the cathedrals,’ he says, speaking to me from Paris. ‘I think Monet and I have something in common with series. He said that painting different moments of the day was more of an excuse to look at the same thing again and again – to look at it anew, every day. I’ve been looking up close at Monet’s paintings. They have different colors, really faint differences. Each painting reinvents the light, reinvents the look, time and time again, to bring something new to the same thing. I think my jungles, in this sense, share similar characteristics, reinventing themselves, but I don’t see them as impressionist paintings. I am not trying to capture a moment of reality. They are more symbolic and metaphysical.’

Based on jungles near his hometown of São Paolo, it’s important to point out that Arruda never paints en plein air. He starts with a small canvas in the studio, without an image in mind or mnemonic in hand, building up the picture through memory and meditation. The same process applies to his seascapes, or landscapes – genre descriptions that he resists yet uses for lack of better labels. The subject of an Arruda painting is inseparable from its atmosphere: light, texture, ascension, and a sense of immensity at an intimate scale. Whatever the motif, all of his paintings share the same title: Untitled (from the Deserto-Modelo series).

Working with the museum’s curators, Arruda made a selection of paintings from Musée d’Orsay’s collection. ‘I have four walls where my work is facing them,’ he says, ‘and four walls with just my work.’ With an impish grin, he says he’s looking forward to seeing how the ‘beautiful light’ of Monet’s Nymphéas bleus (1916–19) will interact with the ‘solid’ surface of Gustave Courbet’s La Mer orageuse (1870). Growing up, he was able to see a few Impressionist paintings at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo, but he was almost 30 when he first traveled to Europe.

And instead of France, he went to Italy, ‘to fill my eyes with the colors of fresco.’ He sees in his work a sense of both rupture and continuity with European landscape painting in that he continues to work with nature and light. ‘But my light is not the same as the Impressionists – mine is more complicated. The Impressionists’ light is more about the future, one of discovery, joy, of bringing something new, a sense of delight. My light is one I am still discovering, still trying to understand. It’s more complicated because our times are more complicated.’

It’s a light of meditation, I suggest, then mention that he has in the past praised the work of Agnes Martin, the great painter-meditator. ‘I love her sense of repetition, of seriality,’ he says, delighted to talk about one of his favorite artists. ‘Agnes can make these things happen on the surface of the painting without rhetoric – it’s very direct. Her work is meditative, the painting is spiritual, and she also finds a way to see the world with poetry.’ Both artists have a monk-like devotion to repetition, to finding a certain pleasure in routine. I propose to Arruda that there’s something Sisyphean in his daily practice in the way described by Albert Camus in his book The Myth of Sisyphus (1942). Rolling the boulder up the hill every day is monotonous, yet it brings meaning, even pleasure – and the same applies to the daily practice of painting the same limited motifs on a small scale. ‘I’m happy you saw this happiness or pleasure. The repetition could be a bit melancholic, as it brings some monotony, but what I like about the repetition is that we can make things our own. Through repetition, we build a place of meditation, of mood.’

A concurrent exhibition at Carré d’Art – Musée d’art contemporain in Nîmes will feature paintings that are more ‘iconographic’ says Arruda, alongside his video and installation work. In one painting, a bowl, painted in the cool grays of a still life by Giorgio Morandi, hovers over an indentation on the horizon, as if the vessel has just emerged from the earth and started to float away, while in another a cross levitates above an empty boat. Arruda explains that he wanted to highlight a different side of his practice in Nîmes; in both the paintings and the installation – light projected onto walls like ghostly, ephemeral paintings – he wanted to emphasize the ‘void’ and the possibility of above and below, the potential for ascension, and the limits of perception.

While preparing to speak to Arruda, I thought of César Aira’s great novella An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter (2000). The story is a fictionalized account of a few months in the life of German painter Johann Moritz Rugendas, who, in the nineteenth century, traveled across South America to capture its ‘physiognomic’ likeness. At one point, while Rugendas rides through the inconceivably vast landscape of Argentina, the narrator writes that ‘on the plains, space became small and intimate, almost mental.’ I suggest to Arruda that he is like Rugendas, but in reverse. He travels from Brazil to Europe, not to examine its natural history, but the immense history of Western painting, returning to his studio to make paintings that are ‘small and intimate, almost mental.’ Arruda pauses, and I worry that I’ve taken this analogy too far. ‘Beautiful. I love it,’ he says.