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IDALÉCIO

Idalécio (b. 1952) is a portuguese self-taught artist from a small village in Aveiro district. He started creating spontaneously in the country house where he grew up as an orphan, having no artistic pretensions or interest in revealing the collection he has been accumulating throughout his entire life. It was only by chance that we came in contact with the secret world of this sexagenarian metallurgist, since he never promoted himself.
When we arrived there, the surprise could not have been greater: waiting for us there were more than a thousand paintings and hundreds of sculptures, that only close relatives had the opportunity to see until then. Part of the rooms of his uncle’s house, with whom he lived from a very young age, were transformed into surrealistic galleries, completely filled with his singular creations, while another part of the house served as a museum, preserving the memory of nearly a century of several living and dead cultures. All of this was presented in a vast organized chaos as a result of an entropic process obsessively and meticulously controlled by the artist.
In April 2016, after several months of conversations, the exhibition “D’Idalécio… todos temos um pouco” (We all have something of… Idalécio) opened at the Cruzes Canhoto Gallery in Porto, showing for the first time the paintings and sculptures by this outsider artist. Despite the huge success of the exhibition, Idalécio intended to remain anonymous and continued in the factory where he has always worked, creating only in his free time.
It was not until September 2017, during his second show at Cruzes Canhoto, “Metalúrgico Sexagenário” (Sexagenarian Metallurgist), that he agreed to reveal himself to the public and the press.
In January 2020, he presented his third exhibition, “Santos, Diabos e Outras Bestas” (Saints, Devils and Other Beasts), at the Cruzes Canhoto gallery, where one could notice a greater cohesion of styles, forms, and themes, the result of a successful evolutionary process towards an absolutely unique language of his own.

Pop and populist, surreal and tropicalist, Idalécio is strongly inspired by the Portuguese folk art, of which he is a connoisseur, being a frequent attendee of the festivals, pilgrimages, and arts & crafts fairs that take place throughout the country. There, he recovers some of the elements and motifs of the rural imaginary, in which the sacred and the profane almost always go hand in hand, to deliver harsh and sarcastic criticisms to the established powers, especially those inherited from the Judeo-Christian culture.
In an unusual way, he combines the language of the Portuguese master craftsmen of folk art with some of the expressions of African tribal art, of which he is also a collector, particularly the so-called ‘power figures’. This is undoubtedly related to the fact that he completed his military service in the interior of Mozambique in the early 70s.

In 2025, Idalécio returns to Cruzes Canhoto with “Calendas” (Calends), an exhibition where one can appreciate 50 sculptures that the artist created in the post-pandemic period and 31 paintings made on the back of old calendars from the metallurgy plant where he worked for most of his life. In both cases, the artist’s more intuitive and primitive side is evident. The calendars served as a base to clean the brushes used in his more serious paintings, but ended up serving as a receptacle for ideas and experiments in their raw state. In the case of the sculptures, the artist used only an axe, a lumberjack’s saw, a hammer, and spray paint as tools, which gives them an appearance that is crude and rudimentary, and yet innocent and picturesque.
In the Calends, we find ourselves within the context of the universal history of all that has been created, while something new and mysterious is announced. What will this 73-year-old visionary creator still have to reveal to us in the future?

“I’m a metallurgist. I don’t claim to be an artist.
That doesn’t really matter to me.”