Collective of Outsider Art

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.
In April 2016, after multiple encounters and conversations, the exhibition “D’Idalécio… Todos Temos Um Pouco” opened at last at the gallery Cruzes Canhoto, in Porto, and his outsider sculptures and paintings could be shown in public for the first time. Still, despite having sold more than 300 art pieces during this operation, Idalécio intended to remain anonymous and continued in the factory where he has always worked, creating only in his spare time. It was not until September 2017, at his second exhibition in Cruzes Canhoto, “Metalúrgico Sexagenário”, that he agreed to reveal himself to the public and to the press.
Pop and populist, surreal and tropicalist, Idalécio is so strongly inspired by the Portuguese folk art as is by some of the expressions of African tribal art, of which he is also a collector. His presence in the interior of Mozambique in the late 1970s serving during the war could be at the basis of this artistic influence.
If at the beginning of his creative activity some stylistic inconsistencies are evident, in the more recent production is perceived a greater cohesion of styles, forms and themes, the result of a successful evolutionary process towards a unique and personal language.

SÁTRAPA

Sátrapa appears at the end of 2013 as an alter ego that arises from a combination of factors involving a particularly severe winter and a personal existential crisis linked to a global social crisis. By that time, a rare phenomenon, both physical and metaphysical, occurred, similar to a collision of atoms, causing the release of a significant amount of energy that generated a fever of artistic expression.
In the midst of his creative fervor, in 2014, Sátrapa founds the Factoría de Androides, a space where robots begin to appear spontaneously, creating themselves, without the concrete support of an artist.
What started out as an exercise of alienation, fiction and fantasy, quickly evolved into something larger, uncontrollable, where the androids created by Sátrapa end up hijacking their fictional lives and become responsible for their own actions.

JOÃO ALVES

João Alves (b. 1983, Porto), an absolutely unique artist who denies his academic training in painting, preferring to give rise to his creative multidisciplinarity mainly in the underground art scene, under multiple pseudonyms of which the best known will be the Selva – anagram of Alves.
Throughout 2018 he exhibits in the most diverse spaces, among them the Zé dos Bois gallery in Lisbon and the Cruzes Canhoto gallery in Porto, where he presented the exhibition “Wheel of Fortune”, with great success.

SERAFIM

Serafim is an extreme case of singularity. Nothing in his relationship with the world, including his artistic expression, obeys the expected procedures and predetermined conventions. Since ever, only the different is not indifferent to him.
Diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, he found in the arts a medium where his skills were highlighted, while in all other spaces it were the inadequacies that were emphasized.
His extraordinary qualities lead him to create unusual and surprising associations of forms and colors, not always comprehensible to those who are short-sighted and narrow-minded, but extremely exciting for all those who have awakened senses and an open mind.
Born in Fânzeres, Porto, in 1983, he is an artist with a non-rational expression, always moved by the unconscious in his creations.

MARTINHO

Martinho (b.1970, João Pedro Coutinho) lives in Ovar, where he teaches visual and technological education.
Restless by nature, he soon found comfort for his mental unquietness through his artistic expression. He makes art as therapy, creating in a compulsive and visceral way. Both his paintings and his sculptural objects are marked by an apparent chaotic dissonance that makes perfect sense in the artist’s psychic universe.
He shows his works outside of Ovar for the first time, in this exhibition at Cruzes Canhoto.

ZMB

ZMB (abbreviation for zombie) is a pseudonym of Rui Lourenço, a self-taught artist born in Porto in 1973. He felt the appeal of plastic arts early in his life, but eventually entered the Electronic Engineering course. Especially gifted, he had barely finished the course, when he was admitted as a trainee in a company in the Republic of Ireland, staying there for almost two years until a traumatic event in his personal life led him to return to Portugal.
His artistic expression emerged full-time in the early 2000s as a therapy for the mental disorganization that he went through in this phase of his life, due to serious health problems and lack of valid job opportunities.
With cults and tastes deeply out of tune with the dominant taste, ended up closing in on himself, starting to attend some ateliers of artherapy and exhibiting his works in alternative places of the city of Porto, such as Espaço T, Casa da Horta and A Cadeira de Van Gogh. Parallel to the painting activity, he dedicates himself to writing books and composing music, all involved in a non-conscious process of surrealist expression.
In 2016, he joined the close circle of Cruzes Canhoto gallery’s artists.