Isaac

Isaac was born in Porto, in 1975, but says he was only born six years later, when he found himself standing at the entrance to his father’s grocery store, looking at the huge granite wall of the former Cadeia da Relação (Jail and Court of Appeal of Porto) – his first memory of himself.
At a young age, he wanted to be a pastry chef, but ended up working in a pharmacy. In addition, in a daily struggle for survival, he assembled computers, reproduced technical architectural projects and worked as a driver for a moving company. In fact, it was art he liked the most, so he kept postponing his dream of one day leaving his mark on the world through art.
In recent years he has worked as an assistant in graphic design companies, taking the opportunity to develop his innate artistic skills. By mere chance, this activity led him to regularly come across Porto’s art district, and he is now one of the biggest bets of the Cruzes Canhoto gallery.
In Isaac’s artistic creations, the Judeo-Christian heritage, dualistic and apocalyptic, that strongly marked his childhood and youth, is clearly evident. These are works created in painting or drawing, on canvas, wood, paper or cardboard, with a naïve surrealist expression.

In September 2024, he presented his first solo exhibition, “De Súbito” [suddenly], at the gallery Cruzes Canhoto, in Porto. The exhibition is the result of a process in which Isaac went further and deeper in discovering his unconscious, intuitively experimenting with new materials and new stimuli as unlockers of established and repressed practices which the artist felt castrated his creativity. On this exploratory path into the unknown, he experienced an unusual phenomenon of clairvoyance that led him to plunge into an almost uncontrollable creative vertigo. For the first time, he felt that the pieces of his up to now insoluble mental puzzle suddenly began to fit together perfectly, moving from unsettling entropy to reconciling catharsis.