Rubem Valentim (1922 – 1991) was a Brazilian plastic artist and sculptor. He was born in Salvador, Bahia State. Dentist and Journalist by formation, but artist by heart. When he was a child, he used to observe mural painter Arthur Come when he was painting some flowers, landscapes and plants on the walls of his house. Valentim was an obá in the Casa da Mãe Senhora (Mother Senhora candomblé temple), an iyalorixá (high priestess) of the Axé Opô Afonjá, of the Ketu nation. He was a full member of candomblé and would use the elements of the orixás as base for his artworks.
In 1948, Rubem Valentim quits his job as dentist and dedicates all his time to painting. In 1949 he had his first exhibition in the Salão Baiano de Belas Artes of 1955, where he received a prize for his work. In 1954, he had his first individual exhibition in the Oxumaré Gallery, in Salvador. At this time he used to work on non-figurative paintings with strong geometric elements (see illustration of Composição 1). In 1957 he moves to Rio de Janeiro, where he engaged actively in the artistic life of the cities of Rio and São Paulo. He participated in various exhibitions at this time, including the International Biennial of São Paulo. In 1962, with his participation in the Salão Nacional de Arte Moderna he won a trip abroad. He traveled around Europe and established himself in Rome, where he stayed for three years exhibiting and working on his paintings. In 1966, after participating on the Black Arts Festival in Dakar, Senegal, he went back to Brazil and found residence in Brasilia. Even living in Brasilia, Valentim used to participate in exhibitions around Brazil and abroad. He exhibited in the International Biennial of São Paulo, where he won prizes in 1967 and 1973; in the Constructivist Biennial in Nuremberg, in 1969; in the Modern Art Museum in São Paulo, in 1969; in the II Art Biennial Coltejer, in Medelin, Colombia, in 1970; in the exhibition Brazil-Japan Plastic Arts, in Tokyo, in 1975; in the Modern Art Museum in Rio de Janeiro, in 1977 and 1978. Also, he had made lots of individual exhibitions, in Rio de Janeiro, Brasilia, São Paulo, Cuiabá, and various Brazilian cities. One important individual exhibition was the 31 Objetos Emblemáticos e Relevos-Emblemas de Rubem Valentim (31 Emblematic Objects and Reliefs-Emblems by Rubem Valentim) in the Modern Art Museum in Rio de Janeiro, in 1970.
In 1976, Rubem Valentim writes the Manifesto Ainda que Tardio (A manifest even if it is too late), in which he describes his motivations and objectives as an artist. He describes his visual language as plastic and full of signs, full of profound mystic values of the Afro-Brazilian culture. He will show, in this manifest, the elements that influenced him: the candomblé and its orixás, the mix of Black-White-Indian influences in the Brazilian population, and the senses. He gave importance to real Brazilian art, to his plastic-sensorial language, to the folk arts as well as the academic arts, until he arrived to the basic elements of his work: the object-symbols of the orixás. As said, every orixá has one or more objects which represents itself. He gave great importance to the Oxé of Xangô (a Neolithic double-headed axe) and used this geometric element repeatedly in his works. This axe can cut from both sides, showing an important sign of duality in his artworks, uniting the Brazilian and the African cultures.
When Rubem Valentim arrived in Rio de Janeiro, in 1957, there was a revolution going on in the Brazilian arts and in the Latin American arts. Valentim got in touch with the neoconcrete artists from Rio, and both, the neoconcretes and Valentim, had the search for strong cultural roots in the arts of the time in common. During his permanence in Rio, he started to use more geometric elements to improve the graphic rhythms of his works; these geometric elements became the visual power of his works. At a certain point, this closeness to the geometric structure brought him close to artists of the time, like Hélio Oiticica. Rubem Valentim dedicated himself to the compositions with the symbols of the orixás, which definitely changed his artistic life. He reduced the compositions to the basic geometric signs-elements of the orixás. Even working with the neoconcretes, Rubem Valentim never saw himself as one of them. His interests were different, but the influence of this movement in his work will always be noticed. The neoconcretism gave Valentim the simplicity of the sign-geometric element for the precise construction, but he used colors that would make the composition softer than the neoconcrete compositions. Due to his large use of the symbols of the orixás as elements of construction of his artwork, Valentim is considered by many in Brazil as the father of the Brazilian semiotic art. The sculptures, paintings and reliefs of Rubem Valentim conserve multiple qualities, as ritualistic, ancestral, totemic, immemorial, solemn, silent, expressive and synthetic. As Edward J. Sullivan explained about Valentim when commenting about his works for the exhibition Brazil Body & Soul (Gugg
enheim Museum, New York, 2002): “Rubem Valentim created two- and three-dimensional totemic figures that appropriate the Constructivist vocabulary of the Concrete movement.” (Sullivan, 2002: 346).
Also, to show how the cultural atmosphere of the arts in Latin America in the 1950s and 1960s was and how Rubem Valentim used contemporary approaches to his artworks, the following passage is important: “...we can see a number of Latin American artists in the '50s and '60s working with the most advanced research questions of the time (often, defining what those questions were). They inherited the language of geometric abstraction (exemplified by Mondrian), which marked the most complete break with traditional representation, and they inherited Dada (exemplified by Duchamp and his ready-mades), which gave the freedom to posit any object as a 'sign', and which engaged the institutions of the art world in continual critical questioning. In a sense a common starting-point for all their work was the adoption and the interrogation of geometry and its rationale of order (geometry here means not simply 'lines and squares' on the picture's surface, but the surface itself as a two-dimensional plane creating a fictive space isolated from the surrounding 'real' space). So, a fertile tension arises from between a geometric order, with its values of lucidity and modernity, and an invention to chaos, disorder, flux, organicity, the random, the void – which begins to create a new kind of space. Artists of Latin America origin were not of course the only ones involved in this search, but they played a very significant part in it. It was an international dialogue of different origins, experiences and aspirations.” (Ades, 1989: 256).
In this way, Rubem Valentim incorporated the devotion for the orixás of the candomblé to compose, with his own constructivist methods, artworks that (as the Oxé of Xangô) had two heads, two faces, uniting religion and art, the Afro and the Brazilian (integrated and separated), the folklore and the erudite. Even being the master of this duality in Brazilian art, Valentim is an artist who could choose suitable colors to attenuate or to exalt the power of the elements represented. The art object (sculpture, painting or relief) must have been elaborated like a careful composition, a construction of signs-colors with ritual-magic-profound transcendence, as a mean of representation for this creative anxiety in the realm of the orixás.
In 1994, his works were object of a very well organized retrospective exhibition in the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil (Bank of Brazil Cultural Center) in Rio de Janeiro.
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References:
Ades, Dawn. Art in Latin America. Yale: Yale University Press, 1989.
Sullivan, Edward J. (ed).
Brazil Body & Soul. New York: The Salomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 2002.
