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The Mystical art of chico da silva

Chico da silva

A Brazilian artist of Indigenous descent, Francisco da Silva, known as Chico da Silva or simply “Chico”, was painting fantastical universes on the walls of fishermen’s houses in the 1940s when the Swiss art critic Jean-Pierre Chabloz first encountered his visionary work.

The life of Chico

Early life

Born to an indigenous Peruvian father and a Brazilian mother, Chico da Silva (1910-1985) grew up in the Northwestern state of Acre, where his childhood was shaped by the dense Amazonian rainforest as well as the catechizing agendas of the area’s European missions. While it’s speculated that the artist’s father was of the Kashinawa or Huni Kuin group, the degree to which Chico, who identified simply as caboclo, felt connected to his indigeneity is unclear. Following his father’s death, Chico and his mother moved to Fortaleza, where they settled in Pirambu, an impoverished neighborhood made up primarily of migrants united by the shared political struggle for housing and stability.

1940s

Chico’s first known engagement with art was here, in the 1940s, when he began using black charcoal and natural pigment to draw murals on the exteriors of fishermen’s houses. These works caught the eye of Swiss art critic Jean-Pierre Chabloz, who, positioning himself as the “discoverer” of the “primitive” painter, assumed a complex role in Chico’s subsequent career, one simultaneously promotional and paternalizing.

1950s and 1960s

In the early 1960s, Chico established the Pirambu School, an informal workshop in which local artists and curious neighbors learned Chico’s techniques, worked as paid collaborators, and, with his support, developed their own bodies of work.

legacy

Chico da Silva’s legacy, belatedly reappraised, reveals him to be not only a painter of remarkable skill and breadth, but a practitioner for whom working alongside one’s neighbors was the intuitive outcome of a long-established way of life that was centered on communal gathering and the necessary sharing of resources. In forging a practice that eschewed the desires and value systems of a midcentury European and American art world, Chico and the Pirambu School established a sovereign Brazilian art as visually dazzling as it is assertive in its resistance to colonial intervention.