Edival Ramosa’s artistic production is multifaceted, shaped by a series of journeys across both space and time. A natural wanderer, the artist’s poetic journey spans more than five decades, with a focus on his time living in Milan, Italy, from 1964 to 1974. It was during this period that his art took on a poetic form, yet its reach expanded across many other places, including Egypt, Morocco, the former Yugoslavia, the United States, Switzerland, Belgium, England, and several Brazilian cities such as Cuiabá, Cabo Frio, Ribeirão Preto, Brasília, São Paulo, and Ubatuba.
His geometric thinking, particularly regarding circular and totemic sculpture, is distinctive, establishing him as an unavoidable figure within Brazil’s abstract geometric production. In Ramosa’s work, we pay attention to both the abstract elements of his poetics and his engagement with experimental production. As such, when encountering a work by the artist, we may feel as though we have seen it before in collective exhibitions of Afro-Brazilian art, yet we might also fail to fully recognize it.
Central to his work are elements such as spheres, columns, cocoons, moons, comets, arrows, and other “form-objects,” as he describes many of his pieces, each varying in color gradations and geometric forms. Works like Caboclo 7 Flechas [Caboclo 7 Arrows] (1965), Árvore multicor II – Ogum [Multicolored Tree II – Ogum] (1966), Toy para Leonardo da Vinci [Toy for Leonardo da Vinci] (1968), Estudo para o Sol [Study for the Sun] (1969), Lua [Moon] (1969), and Cometa [Comet] (1973) highlight the poetic operations developed by Ramosa, pointing toward a curious facet where non-figurative, geometric work aligns with cosmic realities.
Abstract scenes transform into stars and planetary rings, and vice versa. In Estudo para o Sol, for example, circular lines, transparent voids, and fragmented colors evoke speculative elements: the work might be a miniature version of O Sol dos povos de cor [The Sun of the Peoples of Color] (1969), a large-scale human-sized object – a great semicircle formed by overlapping discs in a palette of yellows, oranges, reds, and purples, ton sur ton, with its diameter mirrored on an acrylic reflective base. Edival Ramosa’s geometric constellation orbits at multiple scales, both miniature and monumental, positioning the artist as a cosmic wanderer on the horizon of abstraction in Brazil.