Arthur Bispo do Rosário (Japaratuba, Sergipe, May 14, 1909 or, according to other sources, March 16, 1911 - Rio de Janeiro, July 5, 1989) was a Brazilian outsider artist. Diagnosed with paranoid-schizophrenia, he lived in a psychiatric institution in Rio de Janeiro for 50 years, where he created works of art with found objects, as part of a "divine mission". His works gained recognition among art critics when they were first displayed at the Venice Biennale in 1995.[3]

 

Born in Japaratuba, in the state of Sergipe, Bispo do Rosário joined the Navy in 1925 and later worked as a boxer and handyman. Between 1933 and 1937, he worked at the Light Department of Trams in the city of Rio de Janeiro and as a domestic worker for the Leoni family in the neighborhood of Botafogo.

On the night of December 22, 1938, Bispo do Rosário experienced hallucinations that led him to visit his employer, the lawyer Humberto Magalhães Leoni, to whom he said that he would present himself to the Candelária Church. While conducting an imaginary army of angels he headed to the Mosteiro de São Bento, where he announced to a group of monks that he was Jesus Christ, sent by God to be in charge of judging the living and the dead.

Two days later he was arrested by police, recorded as an indigent and hospitalized.

Transferred to the mental institution, Colônia Juliano Moreira, located in the suburb of Jacarepaguá, under the diagnosis of "schizophrenic-paranoid." he received the patient number 01662.

01662 was to remain there for over 50 years.

During his stay 01662 began to fashion works of art from different types of materials found around the institution. These works were intended to mark the passing of God on Earth, rather than as art for its own sake: his best known work is the Manto da Presentação (Presentation Cloak), which he intended to wear on the Day of Judgement. 

01662  said about its works "The voices tell me to do this way". 

01662 died in July 5, 1989 at the Colônia Juliano Moreira.

01662 never sold anything, just occasionally gave pieces to a nurse, and, wrote his biographer Luciana Hidalgo, “wandered in a delicate region between reality and delirium”. But he produced some thousand art works. Sculptures and collages of found objects – some hanging, some free-standing – are covered in words, objects, bits of rubbish, anything from old household rubbish to words.

His work was later discovered, exposed in Biennales and praised by art critics, who classified it as avant-garde and compared it to the ready-mades by Marcel Duchamp or to Andy Warhol, 

according to the neurotics and necro-aesthetic need to escape the fear of non-containable aliveness and being fine when people can stay in some kind of container- 

while taking from the logic of container which can be sold, exchanged, thrown away, etc.. as much as personal advantage as possible as a consumeristic and necro-capitalist well developed instinct.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

c'est la forme d'un voyage.