Florival Candeias was born in 1973 as the son of a simple landworker in Alvito, South Portugal. He lives with his parents, and has been looked after and artistically supported in the Cercibeja institution for handicapped persons since he was ten. He began to paint even as a child. In his pictures, the artistic engages with his immediate environment. His motifs are primarily people, animals and landscapes.

Candeias' pictures are especially characterised by their construction from individual geometrical elements and their intensive, warm colouring. In his depictions of people, the shaping of the feet and hands is impressive. The feet appear like powerful, primitive animals living above or under ground. From a stable, elongated form, there grow regular toes, accurately counted and uniform, eager to tread, step-by-step to make contact with the moist grass and moss of a garden.

The artist's figures reach into the pictorial space, dominate their world and spread out. They are never pressed or even lost on the page; their surroundings always take them up. Sometimes there is even a symbiotic fusion. He always treats both the figure and background with a serious intensity: they remain equals, intermeshing with one another, necessitate one another as a person and its surroundings mutually determine one another.

In Candeias' pictures there resonates a deep feeling of intertwinedness with nature, comparable with the world view of the old natural religions. Dreamingly, Candeias moves on the narrow ridge between concreteness and abstraction, sometimes veering more in one direction, then more in the other. The artist Florival Candeias, in his artistic treatment, shows himself vehemently as an individual; for, "in its integral reality, the image is the only way of realising the self in its answer to the world."