While considered to be a member of the Mexican muralism movement, his style was noticeably different, mostly for adhering to older and more academic forms of painting and sculpture.

His best known work is a sculpture called La maternidad which was adapted as the logo of the Instituto Mexicano de Seguro Social (IMSS).

He was born shortly before the Mexican Revolution and spent his childhood split between Nuevo León and San Antonio, Texas, with the family moving back permanently to Mexico in the 1920s.

[3][4] He was born on March 3, 1907, in Monterrey, but later in life, he changed his birth year to 1908 and his birthplace to Cadereyta Jiménez, where his family was originally from.

[3][5][6] In 1922, at age 14, Cantú entered the Escuela de Pintura al Aire Libre, which was directed by Alfredo Ramos Martínez.

[6] In the 1930s, he joined a group of painters with the Inés Amor gallery but soon after, established a studio in New York, as friends of his from Montparnasse were there to escape the Second World War.

[11] From 1951 to the early 1960s, he devoted most of his time painting murals in private homes, with a number of these since acquired by the government of Nuevo León.

[8] He created a low relief called El Flechador del sol in 1961 on the Sierra Madre along the highway between Linares and Galeana in the municipality of Iturbide, Nuevo León.

[6] One notable mural is Los informantes de Sahagún at the former monastery of San Diego, which was the site of the Pinacoteca Virreinal in Mexico City.

He also created a mural dedicated to Greek myth at the Philosophy and Letters department of the Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León.

[4] He also created murals for a church in San Miguel Allende but they were defaced due to a dispute between the artist the institution over how the characters were portrayed.

[6][11] He illustrated poems by writer friends such as Renato Leduc,[15] Luis Cardoza y Aragón, Antonin Artaud[16] and Alí Chumacero.

[3] In 2007, the Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México held a large exhibition of his work for the 100th anniversary of his birth.

He was especially fond of 15th-century French poet François Villon, but also read much of the work of Alfonso Reyes, Renato Leduc, Efraín Huerta, Jean Nicolas, Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Valéry, Lord Byron, Goethe, André Malraux, Antonin Artaud, and Paul Éluard.