Totem, Surreal Force: Art Brut Art Naif Art Outsider Baptista Antunes (portuguese)

Joaquim Baptista Antunes was born on March 8, 1953 in Sertâ, Castelo Branco, one of the poorest provinces in Portugal. The sixth child of a large peasant family, Joaquim Antunes spent part of his youth herding herds, looking after his brothers and sisters, and helping his father collect the bark of the cork oak tree. Very early on, he was considered the “black sheep” of his family because he rebelled against the religious conformism and popular superstitions of his original environment. It was at the beginning of the 80s that he began to draw, after a series of travels, the last of which took him to New York where, knowing nothing about art, he discovered both Chagall and Picasso's Guernica. He was then 20 years old and since the age of fifteen, had been a waiter in a large hotel in Lisbon.
Leading an exhausting life to which he refuses to resign himself, he begins to trace at night all kinds of imaginary beings on the back of sheets of menus that he manages to recover. Very quickly he is noticed by the poet and surrealist painter Mario Cesariny, who encourages him to take up painting. He paints a picture a day in a state of total frenzy. Then, on scholarship from the Gulbenkian Foundation, he moves to Paris in 1987. Subsequently, he joined the Neuve Invention in Lausanne and then the entire circuit of “singular” art.
(Text taken from the catalog of the 2nd Biennale d 'Singular Art in Dijon).

The writer and art critic Laurent Danchin writes about Naptista Antunes:
In the universe of Baptista Antunes, a self-taught and singular artist if ever there was one, animal life, cruel, insatiable, burgeons from all sides. Compact puzzle of beings who devour each other, an ambiguous kingdom where fauna and flora merge, everything is mouthy, even the feet. The tails are claws, the fingers are crests, forks, claws or hooves. The trees walk, bellies become faces, birds fly, equipped with fins. Everywhere, every creature, as if on alert, has a big eye staring at you. No place for man in this prehistoric and reptilian Paradise, whose strongly sexual, even perverse, crudely pagan vitality in any case, is at odds with the insipid daydreams of a certain naive art...

Our work, an acrylic on board, dates from the very first period of Baptista Antunes' work. It is presented in a frame designed by the artist and titled "Força Surrealista" on the verso.