Alcides Pereira dos Santos

1932-2007 · Rui Barbosa, Bahia, Brazil

A Bahian shoemaker, barber, stonemason and sign maker who received the two great revelations of his life at nineteen, religion and painting, and never separated them again.

The life

Alcides was born in 1932 in Rui Barbosa, Bahia, and worked his way through a string of trades, from shoemaking and barbering to cutting stone and painting signs. At nineteen came what he called the greatest revelations of his life: religion and painting, and as an evangelical Christian he held ever after that art is a gift from God. He moved to Mato Grosso in 1950 and spent long years in Cuiabá, until in 1992 he found his daughter Almerinda after decades out of contact and moved to the outskirts of São Paulo, where he died in 2007.

The work

Acrylic paintings in which the whole landscape is the subject, a kind of macrocreation: geometric fields, rivers and cities scattered with tiny human figures who are never allowed to steal the scene. Biblical narratives sit happily beside trains, transport and technology, all of it part of the same divine machinery. His work is held by the Fondation Cartier in Paris, the Museu Afro Brasil in São Paulo and the Museu de Arte Moderna in Rio de Janeiro.

Why we love them

He painted creation as one working machine of God, crops, lorries and all. Few artists have ever made gratitude look this structural.

Go deeper

• Alcides Pereira dos Santos at the Outsider Art Fair
• Alcides Pereira dos Santos on Wikipedia (in Portuguese)
• Galeria Estação
• Where to see outsider art, our full list of museums and collections.
• The glossary, if any of the terms here are new.

Kindred spirits

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