Rubem Valentim, A ordem do sensível, 2026, Museu de Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro, installation view
2026. Rubem Valentim
Few Brazilian artists are as readily identified with a single visual language as Rubem Valentim (1922–1991). His geometric vocabulary—drawn from Yoruba and Afro-Brazilian sacred traditions—has long defined his place within twentieth-century abstraction.“ a ordem do sensível” (the order of the sensible), however, complicates that familiar image. Rather than simply reaffirming the canonical works—in which emblems, ritual tools, and diagrams of the orishas are synthesized into rigorous geometric forms—the retrospective places celebrated paintings, reliefs, sculptures, and installations alongside rarely exhibited early works to show how Valentim’s use of what might seem a familiar European abstract language in fact expresses both his and Brazil’s Black heritage.
That broader view also clarifies what distinguished Valentim from many of his contemporaries. Concrete and Neo-Concrete artists often pursued universality through the reduction of form, while for Valentim, geometry was never emptied of symbolic meaning but invested with it. Drawing on Afro-Brazilian and Indigenous cosmologies—which regard all relations as sacred—that had long employed geometric forms as vehicles of spiritual knowledge, he transformed abstraction into a language of encounter rather than purification. His work enlarged modernism’s universal ambitions instead of abandoning them.
The retrospective first grounds that expanded conception of universality in the mature works that established Valentim’s reputation. In Composição 17 (Composition 17), 1962, the oxê—a recurrent motif in his work, the double-headed axe symbolizing Xangô, the Yoruba god-king and orisha of justice, thunder, and fire—anchors the composition, while arches and arrowheads evoke the ofá, the set of weapons that symbolize Oxóssi, the orisha of hunt and jungles. These elements are more than just quotations from Afro-Brazilian cosmology; they work as the structure of an abstract language. Valentim treats symbolism as geometry’s very condition, transforming modernism’s formal vocabulary into one capable of sustaining ritual, memory, and transcendence.
Having established this familiar language, the exhibition begins to unsettle it. A section devoted to Valentim’s formative years in Salvador in the Brazilian state of Bahia introduces paintings and drawings—some figurative, some abstract, all with loose, organic lines—that many viewers are unlikely to know, placing them alongside the abstract paintings and sculptures with the flat colors arrayed in geometric structures that have long defined his reputation. The juxtaposition quietly alters the terms on which the later works are understood, revealing that his practice was, at first, more directly informed by European modernism. It was only subsequently that he engaged with that legacy in a more oblique and subtle way.
That engagement comes into focus in the early paintings: Paisagem (Landscape), ca. 1940, with its saturated palette and simplified landscape, recalls Fauvism as well as the work of Brazilian painter Aldo Bonadei, while Natureza morta (cópia de Cézanne) (Still Life [Cézanne Copy]), ca. 1940, carefully reworks Cézanne’s Nature morte avec fleurs et fruits (Still life with Flowers and Fruits), 1888–90, cooling its palette into violets and grays. Valentim later remarked that “with Cézanne I learned how to compose”—a statement that resonates here, where his apprenticeship retrospectively illuminates the dozens of works he would eventually title Composição (Composition). An untitled painting from 1956, with its irregular contours and shifting chromatic fields, points toward a more heterodox manifestation of geometry, closer to the playful asymmetry cultivated by Uruguayan painter Carmelo Arden Quin than to the strict visual structure with which Valentim is now synonymous. Together, these works reveal that the openness defining his mature abstraction emerged through his willingness to inhabit multiple pictorial traditions at once.
That broader understanding transforms the experience of more recent works such as Templo de Oxalá (Temple of Oxalá), 1977. Twenty white totemic sculptures, dedicated to the Yoruba god Oxalá and arranged within a circular enclosure marked by white ribbons, no longer appear simply as the culmination of a singular symbolic vocabulary but as the outcome of an artistic practice that absorbed disparate visual traditions, turning abstraction into a vehicle for ritual, collective, and transcendental experiences. Its dispersed arrangement invites festive gathering rather than introspective contemplation, making abstraction a social rather than an exclusively visual experience.
Installed in Affonso Eduardo Reidy’s landmark of Brazilian modern architecture, the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro, Valentim’s work acquires an unexpected historical resonance. The encounter feels not like an insertion of Afro-Brazilian visual culture into the institutional space of modernism, but an invitation to recognize that Brazilian modernism was always more porous than its canonical narratives have suggested.
Text originally published in Artforum, vol. 65, n. 1, September 2026
That broader view also clarifies what distinguished Valentim from many of his contemporaries. Concrete and Neo-Concrete artists often pursued universality through the reduction of form, while for Valentim, geometry was never emptied of symbolic meaning but invested with it. Drawing on Afro-Brazilian and Indigenous cosmologies—which regard all relations as sacred—that had long employed geometric forms as vehicles of spiritual knowledge, he transformed abstraction into a language of encounter rather than purification. His work enlarged modernism’s universal ambitions instead of abandoning them.
The retrospective first grounds that expanded conception of universality in the mature works that established Valentim’s reputation. In Composição 17 (Composition 17), 1962, the oxê—a recurrent motif in his work, the double-headed axe symbolizing Xangô, the Yoruba god-king and orisha of justice, thunder, and fire—anchors the composition, while arches and arrowheads evoke the ofá, the set of weapons that symbolize Oxóssi, the orisha of hunt and jungles. These elements are more than just quotations from Afro-Brazilian cosmology; they work as the structure of an abstract language. Valentim treats symbolism as geometry’s very condition, transforming modernism’s formal vocabulary into one capable of sustaining ritual, memory, and transcendence.
Having established this familiar language, the exhibition begins to unsettle it. A section devoted to Valentim’s formative years in Salvador in the Brazilian state of Bahia introduces paintings and drawings—some figurative, some abstract, all with loose, organic lines—that many viewers are unlikely to know, placing them alongside the abstract paintings and sculptures with the flat colors arrayed in geometric structures that have long defined his reputation. The juxtaposition quietly alters the terms on which the later works are understood, revealing that his practice was, at first, more directly informed by European modernism. It was only subsequently that he engaged with that legacy in a more oblique and subtle way.
That engagement comes into focus in the early paintings: Paisagem (Landscape), ca. 1940, with its saturated palette and simplified landscape, recalls Fauvism as well as the work of Brazilian painter Aldo Bonadei, while Natureza morta (cópia de Cézanne) (Still Life [Cézanne Copy]), ca. 1940, carefully reworks Cézanne’s Nature morte avec fleurs et fruits (Still life with Flowers and Fruits), 1888–90, cooling its palette into violets and grays. Valentim later remarked that “with Cézanne I learned how to compose”—a statement that resonates here, where his apprenticeship retrospectively illuminates the dozens of works he would eventually title Composição (Composition). An untitled painting from 1956, with its irregular contours and shifting chromatic fields, points toward a more heterodox manifestation of geometry, closer to the playful asymmetry cultivated by Uruguayan painter Carmelo Arden Quin than to the strict visual structure with which Valentim is now synonymous. Together, these works reveal that the openness defining his mature abstraction emerged through his willingness to inhabit multiple pictorial traditions at once.
That broader understanding transforms the experience of more recent works such as Templo de Oxalá (Temple of Oxalá), 1977. Twenty white totemic sculptures, dedicated to the Yoruba god Oxalá and arranged within a circular enclosure marked by white ribbons, no longer appear simply as the culmination of a singular symbolic vocabulary but as the outcome of an artistic practice that absorbed disparate visual traditions, turning abstraction into a vehicle for ritual, collective, and transcendental experiences. Its dispersed arrangement invites festive gathering rather than introspective contemplation, making abstraction a social rather than an exclusively visual experience.
Installed in Affonso Eduardo Reidy’s landmark of Brazilian modern architecture, the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro, Valentim’s work acquires an unexpected historical resonance. The encounter feels not like an insertion of Afro-Brazilian visual culture into the institutional space of modernism, but an invitation to recognize that Brazilian modernism was always more porous than its canonical narratives have suggested.
Text originally published in Artforum, vol. 65, n. 1, September 2026
Rubem Valentim, Composição 17 (Composition 17), 1962, oil on canvas, 100 x 70 cm
Rubem Valentim, Natureza morta (cópia de Cézanne) (Still Life [Cézanne Copy]), c. 1940, oil and tempera on cardboard, 38.1 x 46 cm