Chico da Silva: brazilian mithologies: Independent 20th Century

Chico da Silva: Brazilian mythologies 

The project for Independent 20th Century 2022 consists of a monographic exhibition of works by Chico da Silva (1910, Alto Tejo, Acre, Brazil – 1985, Fortaleza, Ceará, Brazil), a Brazilian self-taught artist of indigenous descent who deals with elements, images, and references from Brazilian indigenous and popular cultures, cosmologies, and mythologies.

Chico da Silva was born surrounded by the Amazon rainforest in Alto Tejo, but while still a child he moved to Ceará, in northeastern Brazil, passing through some countryside cities until he settled in Fortaleza in 1935, where he lived until his death. While painting the whitewashed walls of the fishermen’s houses in Praia Formosa, his artistic production began. Da Silva gave shape and color to his drawings with pieces of charcoal, bricks, leaves, and other elements found around him.

Jean-Pierre Chabloz (1910, Lausanne, Switzerland – 1985, Fortaleza, Ceará, Brazil), a Swiss critic and artist who moved to Brazil in 1940 because of World War II, traveled to Fortaleza for work in 1943, where he found da Silva’s drawings on a visit to the beach. Admired, Chabloz encouraged him and provided him with materials to pursue his artistic research. This encounter had great relevance in the consolidation and dissemination of Chico da Silva’s work, opening doors for him to circulate in the main urban centers of Brazil, such as Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, and throughout Europe, in cities such as Geneva, Neuchâtel, Lausanne, and Paris.

In his gouaches and paintings, Chico da Silva represented mainly the creatures of the forest, such as Amazon birds and fish, as well as fanciful figures, such as dragons. His artworks give form to stories and mythologies from the oral tradition of the culture of Northern Brazil, in compositions marked by rich polychromy and by the graphic details of the drawing, composed of colorful wefts and lines. About his universe and his processes, Jean-Pierre Chabloz makes the following considerations in the text “Un indien brésilien ré-invente la peinture” [A Brazilian Indigenous* reinvents painting], originally published in the French magazine Cahier d'Art, in 1952: 

Everywhere that the visionary gouaches of the Beach Painter were exhibited, in Fortaleza itself, in Rio, in Geneva, in Lausanne, in Lisbon, there were these fortunate people who could see in the wonderful universe of Francisco Silva, the Indian, what I had seen. Each of his gouaches contains and proposes a universe that goes far beyond the subject matter. Amazonian legends, childhood memories, rites and magical practices, natural spectacles transposed by poetic assumption, individual and racial psychic complexes exteriorized through symbol, voluptuousness (...) of lines, movements, colors, form the extraordinarily rich and subtle background of this universe. As could be foreseen, he attracted the most diverse attention. Artists and poets, art critics and journalists, ethnographers and psychoanalysts were thrilled and will still be thrilled by these surprising colorful condensations on several planes, which reveal, in each one, new horizons (...).

Given the originality of his style and compositions, he stood out in the context of the so-called Brazilian popular art and, in addition to achieving great commercial success during his lifetime, he attracted considerable interest from critics. Among the major exhibitions he has participated in are: Francisco da Silva, Galerie Pour L’Art, Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1950; Exposition d’Art Primitif et Moderne [Exhibition of Primitive and Modern Art], Musée d‘Ethnographie, Neuchâtel, Switzerland, in 1956; 8 Peintres Naïfs Brésiliens [8 Brazilian Naïve Painters], Galerie Jacques Massol, Paris, France, in 1965; 9ª São Paulo Art Biennial, Brazil, in 1967; Tradição e Ruptura: Síntese de Arte e Cultura Brasileiras [Tradition and Rupture: Synthesis of Brazilian Art and Culture], Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, Brazil, in 1984. In addition, in 1966 he received the Honorable Mention award for his participation in the 33rd Venice Biennale.

Convinced about the relevance of da Silva’s work and how much it contributes to Brazilian art, Chabloz also suggests the reception that would be at his level:

I sometimes like to imagine Francisco Silva decorating government ministries and palaces, post offices and telegraphs, banks, schools, and rich private houses. A lifetime would not be enough. But by dedicating his life to this task, the humble painter from Ceará beach, through the radiant proclamation of (...) an authentically Brazilian art, would single-handedly redeem his country from the unpleasant and involuntary sabotage that once deprived it of its pictorial springtime.

Although he has fallen into certain oblivion, due to the paths he took at the end of his career, today Chico da Silva's work is being taken up again and updated with new readings and approaches.  This goes along with a growing contemporary interest in the art produced by self-taught and non-canonical artists who work outside the traditional art system, and who have created their own, original visions about their cultures and the society in which they lived. Currently, his works are part of numerous public collections, among them: Museo del Barrio, New York, USA; Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro - MAM, Brazil; Museu de Arte do Rio de Janeiro – MAR, Brazil; Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo – MAC USP, Brazil; and Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand – MASP, Brazil.

Presenting, discussing, and disseminating Chico da Silva's work from a contemporary perspective brings to debate the diverse sources of knowledge that constitute Brazilian culture and art, escaping from the traditional and Eurocentric perspectives that have long dominated the narratives of artistic and cultural production in Brazil.

_____

* Some terms used in the period when Jean Pierre Chabloz wrote his text have fallen into disuse, so we have updated them for the current context.