“Examining Myself and Others: Victor Arruda and Carroll Dunham” at Almeida & Dale

The exhibition “Examining Myself and Others: Victor Arruda and Carroll Dunham” pairing Victor Arruda and Carroll Dunham in a duet of painting and drawing opens today, Saturday, July 13th at 11am. According to curator Dan Nadel, the artists are linked through their explorations of masculinity, conflict, sex, and consciousness through bent and gendered figures that exist in and against impossible environments, and vibrant colorways. 

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. 

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. 

Although the two artists come from quite different perspectives and processes, both of them 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. 

Dan Nadel, general curator of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, Los Angeles, was invited by Almeida & Dale to compose the show in São Paulo.   

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“Examining Myself and Others: Victor Arruda and Carroll Dunham” 
Curated by: Dan Nadel 
Opening: July 13, from 11am to 4pm 
Almeida & Dale 
Rua Caconde, 152 - Jd. Paulista, São Paulo/SP, Brazil
Content Rating: PG-18