For Arco Madrid 2024, Almeida & Dale is honored to present the sacred geometry of Rubem Valentim in a remarkable set of paintings, sculptures and reliefs that demonstrate the visual and poetic richness of his production. A learned and deeply spiritual person, Valentim led his artistic career along a path of introspection. Closely linked to his inner life, his art translates Black Brazilian cultural roots, particularly the rich imagery of African diasporic religions such as Candomblé and Umbanda, in an original and inventive way.

A self-taught artist, Valentim started painting from a young age and gained prominence in the late 1940s, when he joined a group of artists engaged in breathing new life into the art scene in Bahia. Valentim embraced the strong wave of geometric abstraction that spread in Brazilian art in the 1950s, but unlike most of his contemporaries, he took his work in a direction opposite to the European matrix and guided by rationalist rigor. Immersed in the cultural environment of Salvador – the city with the largest Black population outside the African continent – Valentim worked with the iconography of Candomblé, the instruments of worship and the symbolism of the orixás, which he transformed into a visual language he revisited throughout his career.

The works on display reveal the rich repertory of motifs Valentim often resorted to and mixed in different ways to construct emblems that function as equations. They combine basic geometric shapes – triangles, rectangles, circles, trapezoids – and figures created from a sober transformation of Candomblé images and signs, such as the oxê, Xangô’s double axe – which became a kind of logo in his work; Exu’s trident; Oxalá’s sceptre, called opaxorô, and other elements from the Yoruba tradition. Going beyond the mere formalistic use of religious images, Valentim maintains the connection between these emblems and their origins, reinforcing the link with the meanings they manifest, such as protection, sexuality, birth, death, rebirth, the cycle of life and nature. The symbolism of the vertical and horizontal planes, linked respectively to the divine and the human realms, as well as the use of colors related to the orixás, are also central to his work.

The reliefs and sculptures gathered here demonstrate the constant renewal of Valentim’s work, which followed his geographical displacements and the expansion of his visual repertoire. The totem-like wooden sculptures, which can be exhibited individually or in sets, represent a phase of Valentim’s work in which he explored the idea of monumentality. Some of these pieces were created when the artist lived in Brasilia, and relate to the spatial stimulus exerted by the new capital’s urban design on Valentim’s creative process. The works come to occupy the space in a different way and, with their presence charged with sacredness, they function as altars. The creation of a space of spiritual vibration is an act that also underpins the works in the series Emblemágicos, which arose from Valentim’s fascination with the pontos riscados [sacred signs] of Umbanda, a religion he learned about when he lived in Rio de Janeiro.

Interested in creating an art language that was fundamentally Brazilian but not nationalist, one that synthesized all the nuances of this identity, Valentim kept an eye open to the universal and made his work a constant investigation of the world and of his own place in it. He studied the sacred practices and culture of Indigenous America and various non- Western civilizations. Gathered in this selection of works, Valentim’s constructions renew the age-old union of art with the intangible and the sacred in all their forms.