by Bruno Pinheiro
In October 1977, Rubem Valentim presented his work Templo de Oxalá [Oxalá Temple] at the 14th Bienal de São Paulo. The installation comprised a set of twenty sculptures, meticulously arranged over a 200-square-meter expanse of synthetic green turf, accompanied by ten reliefs set against a blue background. The pieces were constructed from plywood, painted with white acrylic paint, and exhibited the strict geometric vocabulary that Valentim had consolidated years prior, in the early 1960s.
The work was featured in the “Wall as Support” section of the Bienal, alongside the creations of eighteen other artists hailing from diverse international backgrounds. Each artist contributed a unique proposal that explored the integration of art with architecture and landscape. As Valentim revealed in an interview published in Correio Braziliense a year after the show, the invitation to create a work for this section was based on a previous project of his in Brasília: the marble façade he created in 1972 for the headquarters building of the Companhia Urbanizadora da Nova Capital do Brasil (Novacap) — today the Federal District’s Finance Department.
The group of works included in Valentine’s Templo was part of one of the seven “contemporary propositions” conceived by the 14th edition’s team of curators. This was the first Bienal to change the model of exhibition spaces that were divided by nationality, and presented a curatorial project conceived by a team of seven men and women, which was called the Art Council.
Rubem Valentim began painting in 1949, shortly after witnessing the Exposição de arte moderna at the Biblioteca Pública do Estado da Bahia in Salvador. The impact of the exhibition led Valentim to rent a room in an old building in the city center and set up his first studio. He soon divided his daily life between his work as a dentist and his research in painting. The artist sought abstraction from the physical world around him, studying Cézanne and Kandinsky in books borrowed from the Museu do Estado. During his first decade as a painter, Valentim explored various abstract traditions––from Western modernism to esoteric iconography to Afro-Brazilian religious visuality––in search of the poetics that would be consolidated years later.
In the same period as Valentim’s initiation into painting, a network of modernist critics and artists was emerging in Salvador, centered around the concept of establishing a Museum of Modern Art within the city. Concurrently, he confronted significant challenges in his career as a painter. On the one hand, the local modernist milieu exhibited a predilection for figurative art, particularly works that aligned with the burgeoning commercial interest and the agenda of state institutions, portraying a Bahia characterized by harmonious racial relations. Conversely, the mechanisms of legitimization within this artistic domain were often constrained for Black artists like him, as was the case with any other specialized professional milieu in a city where racial inequality was profound and evident.
In 1959, Valentim moved to Rio de Janeiro. This was a period of great transformation in his career. While consolidating his visual vocabulary based on the sacred instruments of Candomblé, he began to live in an artistic environment much more committed to the study of geometric abstraction. On the other hand, he was increasingly exposed to works of African art in Brazil, given the growing debate on the decolonization of Africa. In 1962, he considered taking the travel award from the Salão Nacional de Arte Moderna to a country on the African continent, but finally decided to go to Rome the following year, where he lived until 1966.
The twenty sculptures installed in 1977 on the synthetic turf at the Templo de Oxalá exhibit a range of heights. A commonality among them is a hieratic form that projects towards the sky. These works align with Valentim’s geometric vocabulary, derived from the continuous manipulation of oxês, ofás, and other orisha tools. This symbolic lexicon produces a rhythm of variations and repetitions that alternate between high reliefs and empty spaces.
The arrangement of the sculptures in the exhibition plays a fundamental role in the perception of the work. As viewers move through the space, they experience a sense of shifting spatiality. This sensation oscillates between the rigidity of the pieces and the dynamics created by the voids between them. In this way, the empty spaces become the constitutive matter of the work, producing a sense of circulation reminiscent of axé, the vital energy that flows through human and non-human bodies.
The prevalence of white, the funfun of Yoruba culture, refers to Oxalá, to whom the geometric Templo is dedicated. This same white is also evocative of another very quotidian experience for Valentim: the color and rhythm of the buildings in Brasília, where he relocated after returning from Rome. The uniformity of his totem-like figures resonates with the aesthetics of Brasília’s modern architecture, which was designed by Oscar Niemeyer and Lúcio Costa. In this sense, Brasília itself can be regarded as a sculpture, an environment where viewers can navigate a space produced within the same uniform visual program.
As previously discussed, Valentim’s contributions to the city’s urban landscape were evident as early as 1972, when he designed the white marble reliefs for the Novacap building. This work was in alignment with his research into environmental art. The juxtaposition of marble and plywood in these works facilitates an experiential engagement with his Templo, which can be interpreted as an exercise in speculative architecture. This architectural exercise signifies intimate spaces of contemplation and connection with the sacred, as well as the projection of a totalizing architectural style. This totalizing style aligns with the African worldviews that underpin the social experience in the country, as evidenced by the Brasília project.
The Templo de Oxalá functions as a model within a larger artistic project that pointed to the reworking of Brazilian reality in the years before redemocratization, similar to the space built in Brasilia. In Valentim’s case, this initiative was underpinned by Afro-Brazilian cultural values, coinciding with a period marked by mounting tensions, primarily led by Black cultural organizations, which demanded recognition of the centrality of African cultures in the national experience, as Osmundo Pinho noted in his analysis of the process of “re-Africanization” of Carnaval during the same period.
The persistence of Rubem Valentim’s project can be seen in the reinstallation of the work during the 35th Bienal de São Paulo in 2023. At that time, works like Templo de Oxalá were not the norm, but the exception. And it is in the displacement of this work as the center of a tradition formed by Black artists like Valentim, or artists of other non-white racial groups, that it gains strength for contemporary art today. In this sense, the 35th Bienal was also the first edition with a curatorial team composed mainly of Black people. Between these two moments, 1977 and 2023, the Templo de Oxalá reminds us of the importance of the forms of knowledge and organization of social structures that are ancestral to us and that have persisted despite the violence that has been reproduced and reorganized since the period of colonialism.
About the author
Bruno Pinheiro is an art historian, curator, and educator. He holds a Ph.D. in history from Unicamp and is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he is conducting research on Black modernist artists from Latin America and the Caribbean. He has research and teaching experience in the art history and visual culture of the African diaspora in the Americas.
This text is part of a series dedicated to the Arquivo Histórico Wanda Svevo, which turns 70 in 2025. All the images in this series are illustrated by photos kept in the Bienal Archive. Take the opportunity to visit the Archive’s website and its database, which is always open to the public and will soon be translated to English. The initiative is supported by Promac.
