At age 4, Fernando moved to Rio de Janeiro with his mother, who was an excellent seamstress. They lived in tenement houses and he used to accompany his mother to the houses of the rich and the wealthy. Ever since he was a boy, Fernando dreamed of being an engineer. He was intelligent and always the first student of his class. He got to the first year of high school, but then abandoned his studies.

In 1944, he was arrested on the charge of swimming naked at Copacabana beach. In 1949, he started to attend the Occupational Therapy Section. When he arrived at the studio, he wouldn’t raise his head and his low voice could barely be understood. When asked why his paintings are so beautiful, he responded: “It’s not me, it’s the paint.” In his work, figurative and abstract forms blend together, from the simplest to the most complex compositional structures.

Fernando produced a great number of works: canvases, drawings, tapestries, sculptures and woodcuts. He summed up his output in a definitive way: “The painter is like an endless book.”