Joao Baptista Antunes

Born: 1953

Biography:

Joaquim Baptista ANTUNES was born on March 8, 1953, in Sertâ, Castelo Branco, one of the poorest provinces in Portugal. He is the sixth child of a large peasant family. Joaquim Baptista Antunes spent part of his childhood herding sheep, taking care of his brothers and sisters, and helping his father collect cork from oak trees. He was considered the 'black sheep' of his family at a young age due to his rebellion against the religious conformity and popular superstitions of his origin. It was in the early 1980s that he began drawing after returning from Angola and the death of one of his brothers. He then made several trips, including the last one to New York, where, not knowing anything about art, he discovered Chagall's freedom and Picasso's Guernica. Since the age of fifteen, he has been a waiter in a large hotel in Lisbon. Leading an exhausting life that he could not resign himself to, he began tracing all sorts of monsters at night on the backs of menu sheets he managed to recover. He was soon noticed by the surrealist poet and painter Mario Cesariny, who encouraged him to take up painting (he then painted a canvas per day in a state of total frenzy). Later, as a Gulbenkian Foundation scholar, he settled in Paris in 1987. His work, escaping the surrealist constellation, would later join the Neuve Invention circuit in Lausanne and the art 'singular' circuit. Joaquim Antunes' paintings, with symbolic and decorative inspiration, always present a central puzzle of monsters embedded in each other.