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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.
The exhibition that took place in the gallery Cruzes Canhoto in April 2016 was the first time that his outsider paintings and sculptures were exhibited in public, not before five months of efforts in order to convince him to accept showing his works.
Despite having sold more than 300 art pieces in recent months, Idalécio intends to remain anonymous and continues to work in the factory where he has always worked, creating only in his spare time.

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