The Oxalá Temple installation can be understood as the culmination of Rubem Valentim’s work. It was created in 1977 and in that same year exhibited for the first time, at the 14th São Paulo Biennial. The first traces of this work appear in the artist’s notebooks from the previous decade, in which he explored compositions featuring sculptural objects.
The installation is completely white, the sacred colour of Oxalá, and abandons two-dimensional formats to present a set of 20 totemic structures that are nearly adult human size. When it was first exhibited, it was presented together with a large wooden mural composed of 14 white reliefs on a blue background. This piece was painted white after the Biennial and permanently installed at Itamaraty Palace in Brasilia.
Oxalá Temple invites immersion in an environment that evokes an Afro-Brazilian religious space. Through the plastic-visual-signographic language that Valentim described in his 1976 manifesto, the work manifests “the deep mythical values of an Afro-Brazilian (mestizo-animist-fetishist) culture”.