Rubem Valentim

Ruben Valentim was a self-taught Brazilian artist, who primarily worked with painting, sculpture, and printmaking. Born in 1922, Valentim began making art in the late 1940s, earnestly trying to develop a specific visual language which could speak to Brazil’s complex cultural heritage. The Concrete and Neo-Concrete movements in Brazil were flourishing in this era. However, Valentim felt a need to cultivate an artistic vernacular in order to meditate on the intricacies of the national identity as well as weave together formal geometric fragments with the spiritual iconography of Afro-Brazilian religions such as Candomblé and Umbanda. Whilst artists such as Lygia Pape and Waldemar Cordeiro were stretching geometric shapes in a purist, modernist lens, Valentim applied this methodology to drawings and diagrams representing the orishas or deities of Afro-Brazilian religions. The works themselves have a distinctly joyous, sacred tone to them, with wooden totems organically spiralling upwards and his acrylic canvases boldly placing symbols in undiluted, highly pigmented strokes. Valentim is continuing to gain recognition posthumously for his immense body of work and his enduring practice, gaining much critical attention following a retrospective show at Museu de Arte de São Paulo in 2019.