José was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1959. He got to high school level with excellent grades.

Difficulties in his family relationships led him to wander the streets. That’s when he discovered that he could “help the poor with the trash people throw away”, an activity he carries out to this day.

In the mid-1980s he started attending the painting and sculpture studios at the Museum of Images from the Unconscious, where he paints very colourful and symbolically charged canvases and writes texts and poems, revealing an intense creativity in this practice. He is communicative and participates in the gardening workshop and all kinds of activities.