Eduardo Antonio
Eduardo Antonio (Brazil, 1991) lives and works in Lisbon. He holds a degree in Film from the Federal University of Santa Catarina (2019) and a Master’s degree in Painting from the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Lisbon (2024). Since 2021, he has exhibited regularly, presenting his work in Portugal, Brazil, France, and Spain. His painting thus becomes a territory of introspection and permanence, in which the artist explores the relationship between fragility and transcendence, presence and absence. Eduardo creates images that evoke a sense of mystery and contemplation, like traces of an ancestral imaginary that resists oblivion and finds, within the pictorial material itself, a form of poetic permanence.
Painting is his primary form of expression, emerging from the encounter between the visible and the unconscious, an attempt to give shape to what eludes wakefulness. Coming from the Brazilian countryside, the artist brings to painting a sensibility shaped by the night, by silence, and by the symbolic density of dreams and local folklore. The presence of nature is constant in his work, evoking both landscape and a longing for places that no longer exist, places recreated in painting as spaces where memory and imagination intertwine.
His practice can be understood as a mythobiography: an imaginary journey in which personal memories merge with universal archetypes. In his paintings, Eduardo seeks to organize and condense the elements of composition in order to reveal the silent essence of each image. This pursuit of synthesis also manifests itself in his choice of jute as the main support, whose coarse and rugged texture compels a simplification of form.
Influenced by medieval and iconographic painting, by pre-Renaissance traditions, and by naïve art, the artist develops a visual universe that moves between the archaic and the intimate. His images inhabit the space between the real and the symbolic, where the pictorial gesture becomes ritual, and the image, a mirror of the unconscious.
Selected shows include Travessia at Galeria Plato, Porto (2026); Vanishing Act at Studio/Chapple, London (2025); Edge is Virtue at Galeria Dialogue, Lisbon (2025); Wild Card at Galeria Balcony, Lisbon (2025); Abracadabra at Galeria Plato, Porto (2025); Gato/Rato at Safra, Lisbon (2024); Nunca se está sozinho at Galeria 111, Lisbon (2024); Prémio de Pintura e Escultura de Sintra at Museu de Artes de Sintra, Sintra (2024 and 2023); 9 at Casa Dona Laura, Lisbon (2024); Além-Mar: Quando a Linha do Horizonte Não Basta at Fundação Cultural Badesc, Florianópolis (2024); Jov’Arte Bienal Jovemat Galeria Municipal Vieira da Silva, Loures (2023); But Dearer Still is Truth at Galeria Plato, Évora (2023); Todo Verde é Transparente, e Treme ao Vento at São Ateliê, São Paulo (2023); Prémio Árvore das Virtudes 2022 at Cooperativa Árvore, Porto (2022); Calafrio at Galeria Arte Periférica, Lisbon (2022); Floating Paths at Galeria Campo Pequeno, Lisbon (2022); and Raízes de Manoel at Galeria Mercado Público, Florianópolis (2021). Art fairs include Art-o-Rama with Studio/Chapple, Marseille (2025), and SWAB with Galeria Plato, Barcelona (2024).
Selected Works
Encruzilhada (Urutu Branco), 2026 | Oil on jute | 220x160cm | The repetition of narratives in our culture has occurred constantly for a very long time. The crossroads, as a symbol of confrontation and openness, abandonment and transcendence, occupies a profound place in the collective imagination: a space where a pact is made, where the soul is exchanged for some kind of power, or where one embraces the idea of giving up everything in exchange for what one truly believes in.
Cratera, 2026 | Oil on jute | 24x30cm | “In the writings of Poimandres, a pagan Gnostic, the crater is a vessel filled with spirit, sent to Earth by the Creator-God so that those who seek a higher consciousness may be baptized within it. It was a kind of womb of rebirth and spiritual renewal, corresponding to the alchemical *vas*, where the transformations of matter took place.” (Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Carl G. Jung)
Punhal, 2026 | Oil on jute | 20x30cm | In the universe of ‘Grande Sertão: Veredas’, the jagunços are always armed with their daggers, weapons with long blades and sharp points, unsharpened along the edges, made solely for piercing. Left upon the low grass, their gleam reflects the night sky and its stars, like a small path or stream cutting through the backlands.”
Monga, 2025 | Oil on jute | 30x24cm | In the traveling amusement parks of Brazil’s countryside, many children would run away in fear when witnessing the trick known as ‘Monga,’ in which a woman transformed into a giant ape through the superimposition of images and a play of reflections. This kind of transformation, or this intermediate state between the human and the wild animal, represents a recurring archetype found in countless tales and myths across different cultures.