Historian and critic Clarival do Prado Valladares outlines the criteria used to select the work featured in the exhibition Artistas novos da Bahia held in Rio de Janeiro in 1963. He explains that priority was given to contemporary production with a focus on aesthetic and formal questions. The event ended up being a tribute to the work of printmaker Hélio de Souza Oliveira, who died the year it was held. The text comments on the artist’s life and work, his close tie to Candomblé rituals, and his decision to work in the visual arts. The fact that de Souza Oliveira lived in a context of cultural syncretism led him to use a Western technique in work that addressed the ethical and aesthetic values at play in African art and culture.

This text is one of the few of its time on the work of Bahia-born printmaker Hélio de Souza Oliveira, who himself produced only a small body of work. For a few years, he worked on a series of fifty woodcuts that depict objects and scenes related to the ritual world of Candomblé. Clarival do Prado Valladares argues that by choosing printmaking for that work, the artist renewed aspects of the Western tradition such as its rules of composition and the use of the still life theme. De Souza Oliveira is one of the artists who combines the Western and African traditions at stake in the tension in contemporary art from Brazil in his aesthetic vision.

Clarival do Prado Valladares (1918–1983) is a pioneering figure in the historical construction of the arts in northeastern Brazil, mainly in places such as his native state of Bahía, where black culture is central.

For other texts by Clarival do Prado Valladares, see “Agnaldo Manoel dos Santos: Origin, Revelation and Death of a Primitive Sculptor,” coauthored with Russell G. Hamilton (doc. no. 1110478); “Arte brasileño erudito y arte brasileño popular” (doc. no. 1110759); “Artesanato e criação estética: tapeçaria de Genaro de Carvalho” (doc. no. 1110696); “A defasagem africana ou crônica do I Festival Mundial de Artes Negras” (doc. no. 1110461); “O negro brasileiro nas artes plásticas” (doc. no. 1110431); “Primitivos, genuínos e arcaicos” (doc. no. 1110439); and “Tenreiro” (doc. no. 1306676).