Les inattendus, 2008

Baptista Antunes  

Joaquim Antunes, who prefers to sign 'Baptista Antunes', joining the surnames of his father and his mother, was born on March 8, 1953 in Sertâ, Castelo Branco, one of the poorest provinces of Portugal.

Sixth child of a large peasant family, Joaquim Antunes spent part of his youth tending the herds, caring for his brothers and sisters, and helping his father in collecting the bark of the cork oak. Very early on, he was considered the "black sheep" of his family because he revolted against the religious conformism and popular superstitions of his background.

It was in the early 80s that he began to draw, after a series of trips, the last of which took him to New York where, knowing nothing about art, he discovered both Chagall, whose freedom l marvels, and Picasso's Guernica.

He was then 20 years old and, since the age of fifteen, waiter in a large hotel in Lisbon. Leading an exhausting life to which he cannot resign himself, he begins to trace all sorts of imaginary beings at night on the back of menu sheets which he manages to recover. Very quickly he was noticed by the surrealist poet and painter Mario Cesariny, who encouraged him to take up painting (he then painted one picture a day in a state of total frenzy). Then, on a scholarship from the Gulbenkian Foundation, he moved to Paris in 1987.

Subsequently, he will join the Neuve Invention in Lausanne and then the whole circuit of “singular" art.