Cláudia Fazzolari, “Rubem Valentim: a riscadura brasileira,” in Ifê funfun: Homenagem ao centenário de Rubem Valentim/Daniel Rangel (Almeida e Dale Galeria, 2022); Abigail Lapin Dardashti, “Negotiating Afro-Brazilian Abstraction: Rubem Valentim in Rio, Rome, and Dakar, 1957–1966,” in New Geographies of Abstract Art in Postwar Latin America, ed. Mariola V. Alvarez and Ana M. Franco (Routledge, 2018).
Before the photos were housed at the research center they were shown in the exhibition “Parable of Progress” at Sesc Pompeia, São Paulo, 2022–23.
Ramosa exemplified what Rosana Paulino describes as the challenge of reading Brazilian visual art, which “implies the creation of new analytical mechanisms, or perhaps the accumulation of different methodologies that allow us to think of broader ways of analysing artistic productions, embracing the multiple meanings emanating from materials, the social contexts, and the different cultures from which artists come.” Rosana Paulino, “Notes on Reading Artworks by Black Artists in the Brazilian Context,” in Decolonisation in the 2020s (Afterall Art School, 2020).
Kim D. Butler and Petrônio Domingues, Diásporas Imaginadas: Atlântico Negro e histórias afro-brasileiras. (Perspectiva, 2020), 33. Almir Mavignier was recognized by the Marxist art historian Donald Drew Egbert as “the negro painter from Brazil who from 1953 to 1958 had studied at the Hochschule fur Gestaltung in Ulm, Germany,” in Social Radicalism and the Arts: Western Europe (Alfred A. Knopf, 1970). Wilson Tibério was a painter and scenographer who, along with founding the Black Experimental Theater with Abdias do Nascimento, received a scholarship to study in Paris in 1947. There, he got involved in the negritude movement, especially with the writer Alioune Diop, founder of the newspaper Présence Africaine. Tibério traveled to Africa, staying for long periods in the Ivory Coast and Senegal, where he participated at the First World Festival of Negro Arts with Valentim.
Gillo Dorfles. “Novo Universo de Sinais / Edival nas neblinas milanesas,” Mirante das Artes, Etc, no. 1 (January–February 1967): 38.
Edival Ramosa, “Fontes e Metas / Edival nas neblinas milanesas,” Mirante das Artes, Etc, no. 1 (January–February 1967): 38.
One of the first exhibitions Ramosa appeared in was “Perpetuum Mobile” at Obelisco Gallery in Rome in 1965, alongside artists like Grazia Varisco, Julio Le Parc, Bruno Munari, and Victor Vasarely. The “optical” elements in Ramosa’s work were also observed by Brazilian critics—see Harry Laus, “Brasileiro faz Op em Milão,” Jornal do Brazil, 1965.
See Sônia Salzstein, “Construção, desconstrução: o legado do neoconcretismo,” Novos Estudos CEBRAP, 2011; Sérgio B. Martins, Constructing an Avant-Garde: Art in Brazil, 1949–1979 (MIT Press, 2013); Camila Maroja, “Vontade Construtiva: Latin America’s Geometric Abstract Identity,” in New Geographies of Abstract Art in Postwar Latin America, ed. Mariola V. Alvarez and Ana M. Franco (Routledge, 2019).
Huey Copeland, “Necessary Abstractions, Or, How to Look at Art as a Black Feminist,” in “Beyond the Black Atlantic, Its Visual Arts,” special issue, Africanidades 2, no. 2 (2023).
Diane Lima, “Tempo Negro: abstração e racialidade na arte contemporânea brasileira,” in Negras imagens, ed. Renata Bittencourt (Instituto Moreira Salles, 2023), 29–30.
Lima, “Tempo Negro,” 28.
See Darby English, 1971: A Year in the Life of Color (University of Chicago Press, 2016); Denise Ferreira da Silva, “In the Raw,” e-flux journal, no. 93 (September 2018) →; and Diane Lima and Denise Ferreira da Silva, “A poética negra feminista: a força, as formas e as ferramentas da recusa,” in Negros na piscina: arte contemporânea, curadoria e educação (Fósforo, 2024).
Elena di Raddo, Milano 1945–1980. Mappa e volto di una città. Per una geostoria dell’arte (Franco Angeli, 2016).
Dorfles, “Novo Universo de Sinais,” 38.
Both “new totemic construction” and “constructive universalism” are facets of how Ramosa dealt with contemporary artistic topics such as space, size and scale. He exhibited both small-format artworks (in exhibitions like “Il Piccolo Formatto,” 1966), and large-scale environmental sculptures (in exhibitions like “L’uomo e lo spazio,” 1967). For the exhibition “Le Linee di Gioia” (1967), presented in Verona and Trieste, Ramosa said he created “a single environmental sculpture, demanding public participation. Much is lost in contemplation. We fix our gaze on a single detail, and we lose sight of the whole.” See Walmir Ayala, “Um brasileiro em Milão,” in Jornal Correio do Povo, March 14, 1970.
Aarnould Roomens, The Art of Joaquín Torres-García: Constructive Universalism and the Inversion of Abstraction (Routledge, 2017), 2.
Francesco Leonetti in Edival Ramosa: Elementi Originari (Salone Annunciata, 1972).
In Brazil today, using the expression “de cor” (colored) to refer to Black people is dated and racist. In Ramosa’s time, however, it was a current expression and did not have such a negative meaning. This why the expression in the title of Ramosa’s exhibition has been translated as “Colored Peoples” instead of the more modern “People of Color.”—Trans.
Gualberto Schonenberger, “África-Europa vista por um brasileiro,” 1969.
Schonenberger, “África-Europa vista por um brasileiro.”
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (Grove Press, 1963), 51–52.
“A colorida geometria de Edival Ramosa,” O Globo, December 1971.
Author interview with Ramosa’s brother, July 13, 2023.
Jayme Maurício, “Ramosa: visita que não é volta,” Correio da manhã, 1971.
The text is part of a long-term research project on Edival Ramosa, conducted with the support of a 2024–25 Foundation for Arts Initiative (FfAI) grant. The Portuguese version of this text was edited by Aline Scátola and translated into English by Jéssica F. Alonso.