Rubem Valentim

About

Comprised of works made between 1969 and 1990, Valentim’s geometric abstractions intertwine the modernist rationality of Constructivism with Brazilian popular cultures’ representation of Orixás or Afro Brazilian deities.

Valentim’s works are structurally organized and composed of abstract signs made from horizontal and vertical lines, circles, cubes, and arrows. These elements are geometric reductions of Orixás from the Afro Brazilian religions Candomblé and Umbanda. These religions were originally brought to the Americas by enslaved Yoruba peoples from West and Central Africa. Once in Brazil, these religions evolved due to the presence of indigenous groups and the influence of the Roman Catholic Church from the Portuguese colonizers. Valentim specifically acknowledges this forced migration in his totems, which draw from traditional African sculpture and Afro-Brazilian art, by integrating these two concepts Valentim created a new vocabulary that represented Brazil while at the same time recognizing the African diaspora.

Distanced from his Concrete contemporaries, form and meaning are intrinsically linked in Valentim’s works as his main concern was content rather than “optical games”. The use of the color blue for example suggests Portuguese tiles, a reference to the forced miscegenation of the Portuguese colonizer. Similarly the color white lends balance and harmony to his compositions while also representing Oxala, the Orixá associated with the creation of the world, purity, and balance. 

Through formal abstraction, Valentim recomposed the materiality of Afro Brazilian art and the African Diaspora. His work was a rejection of the Afro-Brazilian as a subculture or product of cultural colonization as it was often depicted as.  His interest lied in the “mystical impregnation, the awareness of the cultural values of my people,” and the search for a truly universal Brazilian language.