Painter and sculptor who expressed Afro-Brazilian spirituality in geometric constructions.

Rubem Valentim was an Afro-Brazilian artist who received no formal art training before he began working – first in his hometown of Salvador de Bahia, then in Rio de Janeiro and, after a two-year sojourn in Europe, in Brasília. In his early work, he trained by studying European artists like Paul Cézanne, Paul Klee, and Pablo Picasso. Due to his African roots, and because he was not part of the art scene in São Paulo, he was often marginalised by art critics as a Bahian “magician” of concrete art. He was not granted a place in the canon of Brazilian modernism, even though no other artist so fully realised the demands of the Manifesto Antropófago. In his abstract geometric paintings and sculptures, he “digested” the European legacy, combining it with Indigenous and African references. The symbols he used – arrow, triangle, circle, axe – are based on depictions of the gods Oxóssi, Ossaím, and Xangô, who are enshrined in the religious rituals of Candomblé. Valentim transformed fetish objects into images and religious signs into abstract symbols. He succeeded in transforming the symbols of what was, from a colonial perspective, considered “Brazilian folklore” into a universal, modern visual language.