About the artist:

Raimundo de Oliveira was an engraver, painter, and draftsman. He began his artistic career under the influence of his mother, a religious painter, who encouraged both his drawing and painting, as well as his religious experience. Encouraged by his drawing teacher, he held his first exhibition at the Santanópolis Gymnasium, where he portrayed the school's teachers. After completing high school in 1947, he moved to Salvador, where he attended regular painting courses with Maria Célia Amado at the School of Fine Arts of the University of Bahia and met artists Mario Cravo Júnior and Jenner Augusto.

His first solo exhibition took place in 1951, in the hall of the Feira de Santana City Hall, where he became acquainted with a group of independent artists responsible for the Cadernos da Bahia (Bahia Notebooks). He lived in São Paulo between 1958 and 1964, later returning to Bahia. Between 1965 and 1966, he resided in Rio de Janeiro. In 1966, the year of his suicide, the book "Little Bible of Raimundo de Oliveira. Woodcuts" was published, edited by Julio Pacello, with a foreword by Jorge Amado, and published by the Bonino and Petite Galerie galleries.

In 1982, the artist's second album, Via Crucis, was published by the Bahia State Cultural Foundation, and the Raimundo de Oliveira Gallery opened in Salvador.

Raimundo de Oliveira's work—drawing, gouache, oil, and engraving—develops the religious universe, with saints, images, and biblical scenes represented in various ways. Critics tend to distinguish two phases in his production based on the variations observed in the treatment of the theme. In the 1950s and 1960s, compositions with somber colors and an expressionist character predominate—figures marked by painful and dramatic lines, defined with India ink and black outlines, such as Head of Christ, 1957, Crucified, n.d., and Moses, 1960—and some interpretations show affinities with the paintings of Georges Rouault. At other times, the canvases approach small plots, elaborated with the help of small figures (more humorous than tragic, due to their deformations and disproportions), which are repeated due to the situations presented. Geometrically structured by a balance of horizontal and vertical planes, the new canvases possess a particular dynamism, achieved through spaces constructed around circles. The energy of vibrant colors and the dynamism of the canvas are salient features of this phase, as seen in Jacob's Dream, n.d. In addition to the symbolist influences and the naive art of Henri Rousseau, echoes of Brazilian Northeastern folk art are perceptible in this phase. The religious universe is interpreted through the lens of festivals and popular religiosity, often blending with the profane world—processions, bumba-meu-boi, domestic altars, etc. The plots and modes of representation, in turn, recall the art of Northeastern engravers and ceramists. Elements taken from the national landscape, such as tropical trees and animals, are another way of articulating the erudite and the popular, the universal and the national—Jesus in the Garden of Olives, 1962, and Arrival in Jerusalem, 1964.