Brazilian artist Chico da Silva is known for his intricately patterned and colourful depictions of Brazilian flora and mythological creatures.
Read MoreFrancisco Domingos da Silva, known as Chico da Silva or mononymously as Chico, was born in Acre, Brazil, to an Indigenous Peruvian father and a Brazilian mother. His year of birth is estimated to be 1910 or 1922.
Chico spent most of his childhood in the Amazon rainforest and eventually settled in Fortaleza, a coastal town home to many migrant workers, after his father's death. Fortaleza is cited as the site of Chico's first explorations with artmaking, where he created murals on the façades of fishermen's houses with charcoal and natural pigment in the 1940s.
Chico gained initial recognition as an artist through Swiss art critic and artist Jean-Pierre Chabloz who, with an interest in 'primitivism', introduced him to art circuits in Fortaleza and outside Brazil. Through Chabloz, Chico held his first solo exhibition at Galerie Pour L'Art in Lausanne in 1952. That same year, Chabloz published a feature on Chico in the prestigious French artistic and literary journal Cahiers D'Art. Although an important presence in Chico's career, Chabloz's uneven and paternalistic relationship with the artist has been reconsidered today amidst contemporary discourses of colonialism, exoticisation, and racism.
In the early 1960s, Chico established a series of informal workshops called the Pirambu Studio, where he taught and supported local artists and residents. They also worked as assistants for him, making his paintings more accessible to local markets and homes. In 1966, Chico represented Brazil in the 33rd Venice Biennale and was awarded an Honourable Mention.
Chabloz and Chico formally split in 1969, with Chabloz declaring that Chico's studio production came to devalue the worth of his work. In the years approaching his death in 1985, Chico's career considerably slowed down due to mental health issues brought about by pushback from the art establishment over the authorship of his work. Nonetheless, it is estimated that Chico created around 2,000 works in his lifetime, leaving behind a legacy that provides an enriching alternative to the contemporaneous Concrete Art and Neo-Concrete Movements in Brazilian art history.
Chico's paintings can be characterised by a distinct visual vocabulary that integrates graphic and surreal representations of Brazilian flora and mythological creatures with intricate patterning, repetition, and line work.
Often employing a range of bold colours, Chico crafts expressive scenes where animals are captured full of life and movement—mid-bite, dancing, or circling one another. Pássaro e dragão (Bird and dragon) (c. 1950s) depicts a colourful scene where a large, patterned bird and dragon seemingly vie for the same fruit. In an untitled 1964 work, a mermaid grasps a fish while a catfish looks on. Another untitled 1972 work shows an intricately patterned big fish with its mouth agape, about to devour a smaller fish.
As a result of his workshops, Chico's paintings became widely accessible in and outside of Fortaleza. Eurocentric art world debates on the authenticity of Chico's studio work ultimately neglected the specific communal quality unique to his practice and context as an artist. Brazilian curator Keyna Eleison has spoken of Chico's work as 'authentically Afro-Indigenous,' emphasising that Pirambu Studio was 'like Chico's freedom movement.''.
While largely forgotten by the time of his death in 1985, Chico's practice has since received renewed interest in the art world. In 2022, São Paulo-based gallery Galatea presented his work at Independent 20th Century. In 2023, a large-scale survey exhibition of his work titled Chico da Silva and the Pirambu Studio opened at the Pinacoteca de São Paulo, followed by his first solo exhibition in New York at David Kordansky Gallery.
Chico's work has been exhibited in solo presentations at the Pinacoteca de São Paulo; Museu de Arte Sacra, São Paulo; and Palácio Foz, Lisbon, and group presentations at the Museu Afro Brasil, São Paulo; Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain, Paris; Instituto de Cultura Hispánica, Madrid; and Musée d'Ethnographie, Neuchâtel, Switzerland.
Chico's work has been collected by institutions such as the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Tate, London; Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, UAE; and Museu de Arte do Rio de Janeiro.
Chico's website can be found here.
Arianna Mercado | Ocula | 2024