Victor Arruda: the tragedy and the mockery is the new exhibition by the Rio de Janeiro-basedpainter opening at Almeida & Dale, Fradique 1360. Curated by Giancarlo Hannud, the exhibitionpresents a selection spanning four decades of Victor Arruda’s practice, marked by a sharpobservation of human psychology, social reality, and the art system.

Rejecting a chronological or linear organization, the exhibition, which brings together worksfrom 1983 to 2026, makes visible the ways in which Arruda represents, with rawness and a distinctive style, the unequal distribution of power—and its violent consequences—from themost intimate to the broadest spheres of life. Through the repetition of themes and figures suchas eyes, mouths, bodies, weapons, geometries, and landscapes, which appear and reappeartransformed, the artist creates a portrait of social tragedy.

As Hannud observes: “Victor Arruda’s work is structured around this tension between tragedyand mockery. Tragedy, here, is the awareness of an inescapable condition: the structures ofviolence and inequality within which existence unfolds, but also uncontrollable desire, the agingbody, the passing of time, the death that will come. There is no possible synthesis. Mockery arises precisely from the impossibility of escaping this tragic condition. It is a refusal to grantany of this the dignity of solemnity. Nothing is so protected by its importance that it cannot beprofaned.”

This is not, therefore, a body of work based on denunciation, in which the artist appears as an omniscient observer. Arruda is implicated, susceptible, and affected by the different forms of violence and hypocrisy that weave through everyday life, as he intermingles them with scenes of the “human drama,” alternating moments of heightened vibration and expansion with points of subjective and existential reflection—to which, it is worth noting, he responds with the same derision.

Victor Arruda: the tragedy and the mockery is on view through October 17.