Chico da Silva

“THESE WORLDS THAT I PAINT ARE NOT MEMORIES FROM THE TIME I WAS A BOY. THIS IS CALLED IMAGINATION, OCCULT SCIENCES, ASTRONOMY...” WHILE CHICO DIDN’T DEPICT STARS OR PLANETS, THE ASTRONOMY THAT HIS WORKS EVOKE SUGGESTS A LARGER, NON-HIERARCHICAL INTERCONNECTEDNESS IN WHICH ORGANISMS FLOATING IN THE DEEP SEA MIRROR MATTER DRIFTING THROUGH OUTER SPACE."

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Born to an indigenous Peruvian father and a Brazilian mother, Chico 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 impover- ished neighborhood made up primarily of migrants united by the shared political struggle for housing and stability.

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. Chabloz introduced Chico to the gouache, paint, paper, and canvas that soon became his primary materials, and championed Chico’s work to the international art world, facilitating widespread recognition that would culminate with Chico representing Brazil in the 33rd Venice Biennale in 1966.

Reconsidered today, Chico’s exuberant, sophisticated paintings shatter the oppressive categories to which they were once relegated. Graphic, often myth- ological or enchanted representations of creatures and Brazilian flora are made surreal through his bold colors, intricate line work, vivid patterning, and exag- gerated features like elongated claws, tongues, and beaks. Other elements of anthropomorphized figures—like open mouths receiving food, large, spellbound eyes, and floating appendages—connect nature to humanity, situating all of life within a broad cosmology of the artist’s own making. This narrative approach to painting, apparent throughout Chico’s career, allowed him to link life in a poor urban area to a realm of dream and fantasy. As he once noted, “These worlds that I paint are not memories from the time I was a boy. This is called imagina- tion, occult sciences, astronomy...” While Chico didn’t depict stars or planets, the astronomy that his works evoke suggests a larger, non-hierarchical inter- connectedness in which organisms floating in the deep sea mirror matter drifting through outer space.