Joaquim Antunes, who prefers to sign his work ‘Baptista Antunes’, joining the family names of both his father and his mother, is an exceptional rarity – a self-taught artist on the verge of being accepted into the inner sanctum of the professional art world.

Until recently Baptista Antunes has been known principally for his strongly decorative and symbolic paintings. Yet this spontaneous artist, an instinctive Surrealist, is also a sculptor. In recent years he has begun to paint on natural forms which he assembles into figures, using roots, tree stumps and pieces of driftwood found along the river and in the countryside near where he lives. As colourful and vivid as the imaginary fauna and flora which crowd into his paintings, these sculptures give a insight into the inner logic of this artist’s world.

His is a universe where everything is subject to metamorphosis. Each touch of a pencil, each stroke of the brush, leads to an immediate transformation, an endless ‘exquisite corpse‘. Here a belly becomes a face, there a foot becomes a mouth or is changed into a fork. A wing becomes a fin. Heads or roots become serpents or fishes (Joaquim’s astrological sign). These multiple creatures, narrowly intertwined, form an infinite puzzle, with a flourish of brilliant flat colours.

Baptista Antunes was born in 1953 at Sertâ in Castelo Branco, one of the poorest provinces of Portugal. One of the many children of a peasant family, he spent most of his childhood working as a shepherd and helping his father collect cork. From an early age he found himself drawn to nature. Reacting against the popular superstitions and the extreme religious conformity around him, he returned to the past, to ancient Celtic ideas, and the local goddess, Trebaruna. For many years considered the black sheep of the family, and having had, like so many creative artists, to throw off old habits and taboos, he has remained a rebel, an anarchist who would, if necessary, resort to anything to uphold his vision of a spontaneous life.