Carlos was born in Rio de Janeiro. His grandparents were French, as was his father, who had come to Brazil as a boy. Carlos was a man with a sensitive and religious nature, who was always withdrawn. The artist quit school after his father’s death and went to work in a shoe factory.

One morning, rays of sunlight fell on a small mirror in his bedroom. The extraordinary reflection dazzled him and he had a cosmic vision of the “Planetarium of God”, in his own words. He started visiting the painting studio of the museum in 1947, brought in by artist Almir Mavignier, who had heard that he made drawings and kept them in shoeboxes under his bed at the infirmary.

Carlos descended vertiginously into the sphere of archetypal images of gods and demons. He worked intensely and produced about 21.500 works – drawings, paintings, sculptures, woodcuts and writings.