At the age of 16, he moved to Salvador, Bahia, to attend secondary school at the Colégio Nossa Senhora da Vitória, where he was a classmate of Gilberto Gil.

Torquato acted as a cultural agent and polemical defender of the artistic avant-garde, including Tropicalia, Cinema Marginal, and Concretism.

He was friends with several major figures of these movements, including the musicians mentioned above, the poets Décio Pignatari and Augusto and Haroldo de Campos, filmmaker Ivan Cardoso, and artist Hélio Oiticica.

At the end of the 1960s, after the exile of his friends Gil and Caetano under the military dictatorship, he traveled to Europe and the United States with his wife Ana Maria and lived in London for a brief period.

On returning to Brazil in the early 1970s, Neto began to isolate himself, feeling alienated by both the military regime and the "ideological patrols" of the left.