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Untitled, 1968

Courtesy of the estate

Collection

Rubem Valentim

Untitled, 1968

Gouache on cardboard

34.7 x 25 cm

TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Collection

Rubem Valentim’s Untitled (1968) exemplifies the artist’s singular visual language—a synthesis of Afro-Brazilian spiritual symbolism and geometric abstraction that stands as a profound act of cultural affirmation and resistance. Executed in gouache, the composition radiates balance and clarity: circles, arcs, triangles, and vertical bisectors converge into a structure that is at once diagrammatic and metaphysical. At the heart of the image, a central golden disk evokes solar power or divine presence, held within a symmetrical, almost totemic arrangement.

Valentim, who was born in Salvador, Bahia, drew deeply from Candomblé and Yoruba cosmology, translating sacred signs into formal vocabularies that asserted the visual dignity and philosophical depth of Afro-Brazilian religious heritage. Here, the work functions as an insígnia—a stylized emblem or ritual form—charged with spiritual and political meaning. The deliberate symmetry and restraint recall modernist ideals, but Valentim’s abstraction resists Western formalism by rooting itself in ancestral knowledge systems.

Made during a time of dictatorship and cultural suppression in Brazil, this 1968 work reflects Valentim’s broader decolonial project—what he would later call, in his Manifesto Antropofágico (1976), a call to “devour” and transform dominant artistic paradigms through the power of Afro-Brazilian consciousness. In this way, Valentim’s art remains both an aesthetic proposition and an ethical stance—reclaiming geometry not as a tool of universalism, but as a vessel of localized, spiritual force.

Today, Valentim’s legacy resonates strongly in the work of artists engaging with diasporic identity, decolonial thought, and the spiritual dimensions of abstraction. This piece stands as a quiet yet forceful testament to his vision: a modernism that speaks from, and for, the ancestral.