Darel - 100 years of a contemporary artist
The Contemporary for Darel is the Perennial
Clarival do Prado Valladares
Darel Valença Lins was an intense and restless artist. Born in 1924 in Palmares, a region in the Pernambucan forest zone, who revealed his talent so early that at the age of thirteen, he began working as an apprentice technical draftsman at the Catende Sugar Mill. This experience, alongside an almost slavocrat regime, would mark his young draftsman’s life, imbuing his future work with a tragic dimension – which is its strength. From adolescence, he understood that art was, for him, an imperative means of expression, and that this compulsion to create would never abandon him.
Still very young, he moved to Recife, becoming an employee of the National Department of Works and Sanitation (DNOS). Pursuing his dream, he requested a transfer to Rio de Janeiro, where he settled in 1946. Two years later, he left public employment to do what he wanted – to be an artist – and never stopped...
Always at the forefront of his time, Darel worked in drawing, metal engraving, oil, gouache, and pastel. He was a pioneer in the artistic use of lithography, becoming Brazil’s most accomplished lithographer, and created innovative languages by simultaneously using several of these techniques. From the 1980s onward, he began creating photomontages, combining collage, pastel, gouache, and drawing. By the mid-2000s, he produced large-scale paintings and also experimented with video art. His multifaceted work traverses all these paths intensely, spanning decades with coherence and reinvention.
In the early 1940s, still in Recife, alongside his work, Darel attended the city’s School of Fine Arts. The education, modeled after the National School of Fine Arts in Rio de Janeiro, was academic and rigid, which displeased him: “Instead of drawing the Greek torsos and Roman effigies we were required to trace during classes, I preferred to reproduce photos of Greta Garbo or Robert Taylor that I saw in magazines. That was enough for me to be expelled from the school after only a few months of attendance.” Only in the following decade would artistic renewal movements take place in Pernambuco, with the creation of SAMR (Society of Modern Art of Recife) (1952) and the Atelier Coletivo (1954), but from 1946, Darel was already far away...
In Rio, he continued to work at DNOS, but in a letter to his father dated December 22, 1949, Darel shows his determination: “Regarding ‘DNOS,’ you must understand that it is for me a ‘Scholarship.’ I intend to be a painter, not a public servant. I understand you… But if I focus on solidifying myself in ‘Civil Service,’ I will forget what I truly want. Above all, we must trust our destinies. What I need is to know how to win or accept loss.”
According to Darel, one day he left DNOS for a snack and never returned... but instead of seeking ENBA, he went to the Liceu de Artes e Ofícios, where he studied metal engraving with Henrique Oswald. The technique was a revelation, and his progress was so immediate that in 1949 he held a solo exhibition at the National Library that already caught the critics’ attention. It is worth reading a passage from Aníbal Machado about the work of the young Darel, as some of the characteristics he points out – such as tragic force, line tension, mystery, and lyricism – would remain forever, becoming hallmarks of the artist:
“(...) The broad stroke of the draftsman and the vigorous cut of the engraver configure massive structures of objects that, through chiaroscuro values, acquire a life of mystery and a muted radiance in shadow. The figures, almost always elongated, assume a tragic force in harmony with the landscape with which they are inseparable, establishing correspondences that enhance the expressive power of both. In the view of some houses, a touch of lyricism softens the line tension and shadow depth: brightness opens in white spaces, and a poetic light bathes the facades enlivened by the trees...”
In 1950, Darel met Oswaldo Goeldi, and they became friends. The woodcut technique did not interest the artist, but the master became his advisor. Through him, Darel encountered German Expressionism, especially the work of Alfred Kubin, which was a profound impact for someone fascinated by Dostoevsky.
Already moving in the art circuit, Darel participated in salons, held exhibitions, and received awards for metal engravings and drawings, and in 1951, he began lithography under professionals from the now-defunct Estamparia Colombo, a printing house owned by Raymundo Castro Maya in Rio de Janeiro. From that point, technique would no longer be an end but a path full of possibilities, which the artist explored like no other.
In 1953, Darel became the technical director of Gráfica de Arte S.A., responsible for editions of the Cem Bibliófilos do Brasil. He also worked as an illustrator for newspapers like Última Hora, Diário de Notícias, Flan, among others, and magazines such as Manchete and Revista da Semana. Despite his intense work, he conducted the first course in artistic lithography in the country at the National School of Fine Arts in Rio de Janeiro in 1955.
Still echoing Goeldi’s influence, Darel illustrated Círculo de Giz by writer and playwright Leo Vitor. In ten stories based on true events, the author, who had been hospitalized in a sanatorium in Petrópolis, addresses illness and the struggle for recovery in a Dostoevskian atmosphere. He and Darel became friends and, in 1956, published an album of the same name, with ten lithographs by the artist, in a run of 110 copies. In this work, Darel adopted an expressionist approach, recreating the oppressive and hallucinatory atmosphere of each story.
In 1957, the artist achieved one of his greatest goals when he received, with the lithograph A Cyclist, the coveted Foreign Travel Prize of the National Salon – a rare feat, as the highest award of this event was mostly granted to painting.
With the travel award, Darel lived in Europe for two years, but the experience proved distressing, and the desire to return was constant. From this, he realized that all cities are equivalent in the confusion of urban layouts and the labyrinth of information – an excess that paradoxically generates anxiety and a deep sense of solitude. Upon returning to Brazil, he created the Invented Cities, a recurring theme he developed in engraving, lithography, and painting. About this production, Mário Pedrosa said: “The line in him is not meant to be read, but to invoke, to evoke an inner vision behind appearances. This is a beautiful function of his drawing, which, although structured and constructive, invites us to penetrate appearances in search of the essence of things. In a Brazil of superficial, illustrative draftsmen or of abstract or inane vagueness, the lesson of Darel’s substantial drawing is invaluable.”
Following his dive into urban life, Darel turned his gaze to the plurality of plastic elements present in hidden corners and monumental symbols. He represents this multiplicity in watercolors, paintings, and drawings, always executed with incisive strokes that create limited fields of color.
In a text about the 1965 exhibition at Galeria Seta in São Paulo, Pedro Gismondi said: “Operating, as always, a profound integration between language and technique, we see the emergence of small chromatic fields as a direct consequence of the washes. A series of different colorations, overlapped and interwoven through transparencies and glazes, creates smaller fields, limited to overlaps and differentiated by a subtle and vast range of colors. (...) The general and the particular are two extremes always present in Darel’s work. To them, we owe the seductive mystery of dramatic tension, intimately inherent to Darelian language.”
Between 1967 and 1973, Darel delved into a symbolic universe reflecting the Cold War. The tension between the United States and the Soviet Union, the specter of nuclear holocaust, and the space race permeate his work, in which angels and gears appear as ambiguous figures: sometimes saviors, sometimes threats. In them, Darel captures the perplexity of a world divided between progress and apocalypse, echoing also the cries of the streets in 1968. Reflecting a time in upheaval, his work was commented on by Clarice Lispector:
“Beauty and nightmare mark Darel’s work. The powerless shock of the individual before the machine. Dark cities where a few lit windows testify that they are inhabited. Psychoanalyzed or not, he is a great artist, and I must speak of the resplendent mystery of his work. From it emanates, in engraving, oil, and drawing, the great mystery of living.”
In the late 1970s, Darel experienced a creative crisis that propelled him toward new directions. He approached a group of semi-marginal youth from Baixada Fluminense and became fascinated by their intense reality. From this interaction emerged a new phase, centered on the human figure. His drawings became free, vibrant, full of color and movement, oscillating between nervous lines capturing the instant and dense, almost dramatic moments revealing, with lyricism and truth, the fragility of these youths. As Olívio Tavares de Araújo stated: “He does not seek to chronicle customs nor to impose moral judgments on what he observes. On the contrary, he contemplates these worlds, which are not his, with sympathy in the Greek sense of the word: he feels pleasure alongside his characters. His ultimate goal is to make good drawing – and he does.”
But it was in the 1980s that Darel would reinvent himself most radically, diving into the human figure – especially the female. Vitor Hugo Gorino analyzes this shift in his master’s thesis: “He is a lucid and realistic man, free of moral or artistic prejudices... he recreates this world in his own universe, erotic, lyrical, and sometimes subversive.”
Darel’s women are mystery and desire, beauty and pain. Prostitutes, figures of the urban underworld, anonymous heroines whose bodies assert themselves through the poetry of line. In veiled settings, among sheets and shadows, these figures gain contour and soul. There is neither disregard nor idealization: there is respect. They are real women, full of sensuality, yet their erotic gestures are often tinged with nostalgia and fatigue. Frederico Morais notes:
“Darel visits women in their territory, the narrow space of a room, on the bed, among pillows, mirrors, and cats. He observes everything attentively – dressing, undressing, objects that compose and define the space, gestures and rituals repeated languidly, lazily. At the same time, he stimulates all fantasies of the model, who masks herself or wears only a wide leather belt. There is an unmistakable erotic atmosphere. As he confesses to me: ‘At the end of life, Cézanne painted apples. Morandi loved bottles. Today, I paint beautiful women, beautiful asses.’”
Entering the 1990s, his work experimented with the fusion of handcrafted and technological. Darel incorporated images from magazines and newspapers into his compositions – not as banal citations, but as elements re-signified by his language. Far beyond mere illustration, they became an essential stage of his creative process. By combining magazine images, personal photographs, and diverse engravings, Darel created hybrid compositions on which he drew, projected slides, or combined with other techniques. In these works, photography ceases to be mere documentation and becomes poetic material – both medium and metaphor. Some of these collages led to lithographs, others remained unique, but all reveal the creative effervescence of an artist in full formal freedom. This constant reinvention places him among the great modern artists, who understood artistic creation as a continuous process of discovery.
At this point, his work touches a dimension still little explored by critics: that of shared cultural memory. As Vitor Hugo Gorino notes: “His lithographs readjust and recompose appropriated images, generating a new construction… similar to the cognitive processes of memory.” Darel transforms the banality of editorial images into visual poetry, as one who restores to the image its symbolic and human charge.
In parallel to his more experimental production, Darel never ceased engaging with the classical foundations of engraving. A teacher by vocation and passion, he taught at MASP, the National School of Fine Arts, and FAAP, influencing generations of engravers. His role as technical director of the Society of the Hundred Bibliophiles of Brazil was also decisive for editorial quality in the country, illustrating volumes with the same care he devoted to his original works.
In the 2000s, Darel surprised again by returning to large-scale painting. Immense flowers, full of color and sensuality, bloom in his final phase as a kind of visual epilogue. These works allow gesture to gain freedom and color to explode on the surface with the vitality of someone who never ceased seeking the new.
In 2005, I conducted a long interview with Darel, who summarized his trajectory with a poetic quote: “A bird does not sing to hear a reply, it sings because it has a song.” This phrase defines the essence of his creation. Making art is not seeking the approval of the market, collectors, or curators, but sharing what pulses, what burns, what blossoms within the artist.
The trajectory of Darel Valença Lins is marked by decisive encounters with artists who, like him, shaped the landscape of Brazilian art. He lived among names such as Goeldi, Lívio Abramo, João Cabral de Melo Neto, Iberê Camargo, Portinari, Di Cavalcanti, Mário Cravo Jr., Djanira, and in Europe, Morandi – the latter perhaps the one who resonated most in his quest for essence in simplicity.
His work drew attention from major critics and writers. Clarice Lispector, Vinicius de Moraes, Olívio Tavares de Araújo, Mário Pedrosa, Frederico Morais, Casimiro Xavier de Mendonça, among others, wrote about him with admiration and respect. Their words testify to the aesthetic and ethical strength of a man who worked tirelessly, generously, and without compromise, until his last day. Darel passed away in Rio de Janeiro in 2017 and, until the final years of his life, remained lucid, active, and passionately creative – leaving a powerful legacy for Brazilian art in the 20th century.
Darel remains today a reference for Brazilian art, not as a monument, but as a living presence: contemporary in every instant of creation, perennial in his legacy.