Idalécio is a Portuguese self-taught artist, born in 1952, in a small village in the interior of the Aveiro district. Fatherless, he grew up in an uncle’s rural house, where he became a man and a metallurgist. It was there that, years later, he secretly began to paint and sculpt in a spontaneous and intuitive way, without artistic pretensions or interest in revealing the collection that he was accumulating throughout his life.
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.