Francisco Domingos da Silva ( – 6 December 1985), known as Chico da Silva, was a Brazilian painter. Illiterate all his life, he began around 1937 by drawing with charcoal, chalk and pieces of brick on the whitewashed walls of the shacks at Praia Formosa, in Fortaleza, and signed his pictures "F. D. Silva", with a thumbprint beside the name.
In 1943 the Swiss painter Jean-Pierre Chabloz, who was in Fortaleza working for the wartime rubber campaign, saw the walls and went looking for whoever had painted them. He gave him gouache, paper and brushes, bought what he produced and took the work to Europe, where in December 1952 he published the article "Un indien brésilien ré-invente la peinture" in the Paris journal Cahiers d'Art. In 1959, back in Fortaleza, Chabloz introduced him to the rector of the Federal University of Ceará, who hired him to paint on the premises of the art museum the university was then setting up. From that group of about forty works came the twelve gouaches that represented Brazil at the 33rd Venice Biennale in 1966, where he received an honourable mention. The following year he took part in the 9th São Paulo Biennial.
His repertoire changed little in forty years: dragons, flying fish, birds and snakes in flat colour, without depth and without empty space, first in gouache on paper and later in acrylic on canvas. Critics classified him in turn as primitive, naïve and folk, and he rejected the most repeated reading of his subjects, that they were a memory of an Amazonian childhood. The largest public group of his works is in the museum of the Ceará university, and there is work also at Tate, at the Museu de Arte do Rio and at the naïve art museum of Laval, in France.
Demand outran what he could paint, and a collective workshop formed around him in the Pirambu district of Fortaleza, where pupils and relatives executed in stages the paintings he finished, signed and sold. It became known as the Escola do Pirambu, the Pirambu School. The arrangement became public in 1969, when Maria Augusta do Carmo Moreira, then fifteen, told the newspapers that she was the author of canvases signed by him. A decade of industrial-scale forgery followed, with his name on pictures sold as souvenirs at the doors of Fortaleza hotels, and the authorship of his work is still disputed. Ill and poor, he spent his last ten years between hospital stays for cirrhosis and alcoholism, and died in 1985. His work returned to museums in the 2020s, when curators began presenting him as an Indigenous artist, a classification that scholarship debates.
Early life Chico da Silva was born at the Alto Tejo, on the banks of the river of the same name in the Territory of Acre, near the Peruvian border, in an area that then belonged to the municipality of Cruzeiro do Sul and is now part of Marechal Thaumaturgo. He had no birth record, and the sources give dates almost twenty years apart: 1910 on his identity card, the date used by Roberto Galvão and by current scholarship; 1914 or 1916 in the painter's own interviews with the same author; 16 March 1922 in the catalogue of his first solo show; and 2 May 1928 in a 1972 conversation with the critic Luiz Ernesto Kawall. He had given the same year to the Correio da Manhã in June 1966, when he also said the family had moved to Fortaleza when he was eleven. The critic Estrigas argued for 1922 or 1923 and blamed the 1910 date on an error passed from catalogue to catalogue, among them Roberto Pontual's Dicionário das Artes Plásticas no Brasil.
He was the son of Minervina Félix de Lima, a woman from Ceará who had followed the rubber trade into the Amazon, and of a Peruvian caboclo surnamed Domingos da Silva, whom Galvão supposes to have been of Kampa origin. The 1961 catalogue names the father as Luiz Domingos da Silva. According to the son, his father owned boats and took the boy along on journeys upriver. The family returned to his mother's home state while he was still a child, and his father died in Ceará of a rattlesnake bite. He lived in Quixadá and then in the hills of Guaramiranga, and reached Fortaleza as a young man, settling in Pirambu, a strip of dunes and fishermen's shacks on the west side of the city.
He was illiterate all his life. As an adult, at the university museum, he learned to draw his own signature, and the thumbprint came later. Before he lived by painting he worked at whatever came: clog maker, shoemaker, barber, umbrella mender, and he made tin stoves to sell. A profile in the Fortaleza daily Unitário in 1967, by which time he was selling through galleries, still introduced him as a shoemaker who had taken up painting in his spare time. Around 1937 he began drawing on the whitewashed walls of the shacks at Praia Formosa, near the Passeio Público and the Poço da Draga.
Chabloz and the first gouaches In 1943 the Swiss painter Jean-Pierre Chabloz, in Fortaleza on the wartime rubber campaign, went with other artists on an outing to Praia Formosa and saw the paintings on the walls. He asked who had made them and was told it was an Indian who turned up, drew, and left. He left his address with the residents, and the two met months later. Chabloz commissioned work on paper, supplied the materials and paid in advance: sheets of bristol board, India ink, gouache, pastel, pencils, pens and brushes. Over his stays of 1943–1945 and 1947–1948 he built a collection of about twenty gouaches.
Before he became known, the neighbourhood took him for a simpleton, a judgement Estrigas would reject, describing him as quick and skilful, with no schooling. The first gouaches entered the Fortaleza salons in 1944, at the third Salão Cearense de Pintura. In 1945 Chabloz organised a show of artists from Ceará at the Askanasy gallery in Rio de Janeiro that included his work, and the first national criticism came out of it.
In that decade the pictures were barely sold at all. With no art market in Fortaleza, they circulated as gifts to members of the city's cultural elite, and a specialised trade only appeared in the 1960s, with the painter himself among the first names to sustain it.
Chabloz went back to Europe in 1948, taking the collection, and Chico da Silva put down his brushes for about ten years. The Fortaleza daily O Nordeste recorded his departure in August of that year. The pictures travelled without him: Geneva, at the Salon Beauregard, in 1949, where the Journal de Genève listed a show of "gouaches primitives" by the Amazonian Indian painter Francisco Silva, running to 12 October; Lausanne, at the Galerie Pour l'Art, in 1950; Lisbon, at the Brazilian embassy, in 1951; and Paris in 1952, where Chabloz showed them to André Malraux and to the critic Christian Zervos. Malraux replied by letter asking that walls be entrusted to the painter. In December 1952 Chabloz published "Un indien brésilien ré-invente la peinture" in Cahiers d'Art. From November 1955 to February 1956 the work was in Le Brésil, the survey of Brazilian primitive, popular and modern art that opened the ethnographic museum's exhibition hall in Neuchâtel, Switzerland.
The university museum and the market In November 1959, back in Fortaleza, Chabloz found him no longer painting and introduced him to Antônio Martins Filho, rector of the Federal University of Ceará, who was setting up the university's art museum. Hired by the university, Chico da Silva painted on the museum's own premises, and from there came the roughly forty works that form the core of that collection. His own account of the job was different: he told the Correio da Manhã in 1966 that he had lasted two days and left because he was shouted at, and a Fortaleza profile of 1967, which confirms that the rector took him on at a good salary, has him leaving with the remark that he was not a man to work for a boss. He took part in the museum's opening exhibition on 25 June 1961 with six gouaches. His first solo show had opened two months earlier, on 10 April, at the offices of the Diários Associados, and ran for a week. Surveys of Ceará artists published in Fortaleza in 1965 and 1967 still credited the Diários Associados with launching him.
Around 1963 he met Henrique Bluhm, a German opera singer who owned a snack bar in central Fortaleza, who became his first dealer and organised shows in Rio and São Paulo. Bluhm was the first person in Fortaleza to call himself a marchand, and after him came Maurício Xerez and José Edilson Pitombeira, known as Dão. In September of that year a solo show at the Galeria Relevo in Rio, organised by Jan Boghici, opened the southeastern market to him. Chabloz broke with him after returning from Europe in November 1962, having lost interest in what he called exploits "more worldly than artistic".
Venice, 1966 The critic Clarival do Prado Valladares put Chico da Silva in the Brazilian delegation to the 33rd Venice Biennale, choosing twelve works from the university museum's holdings in January 1966, and held out against pressure to drop him, which Roberto Galvão attributed to prejudice against primitive art and to market interests. In a letter that September, Valladares wrote that he had been "terribly opposed" in Venice by Brazilians hostile to the painter's presence. He did not travel. Four gouaches were hung, and the jury gave him the honourable mention after the critic showed five of its members the gouaches that had been left off the walls; the Brazilian commission withheld its approval of the award, which Valladares described as the first ever given to a primitive painter at the Biennale. The Biennale's own archive lists the four as Serpente della serra luminosa, Uccello e pesce roni, Drago con serpente and Tronco d'albero con serpente, all of them gouaches, and records the award as a menzione. Estrigas records that the prize Valladares had sought went to Arthur Luiz Piza, and treats the mention as the only award the painter received in his lifetime. It never reached his hands: in 1974 the mayor of Fortaleza was still trying to send him to Rio de Janeiro to collect it. The year after the Biennale he took part in the 9th São Paulo Biennial.
He never left Brazil, but told of journeys he had not made, to countries that included one he called Juberlano, and spoke of an audience with Queen Elizabeth II and a handshake from Charles de Gaulle. In 1977, asked by reporters to show it, he produced a passport that had expired ten years earlier with no exit visa in it.
The Pirambu School The workshop
Demand outran what he could deliver, and between late 1963 and early 1964 he began working with assistants, boys from the neighbourhood. The initial core was five, aged between twelve and eighteen: Babá (Sebastião Lima da Silva), Claudionor (José Claudionor Nogueira), Garcia (José dos Santos Gomes), Ivan de Assis (Ivan José de Assis) and Chica (Francisca Silva), the painter's daughter. The work was divided by stage: Claudionor, Ivan and, rarely, Chico himself did the drawing; Babá, Ivan and Garcia filled in the colour and did the stippling; and he kept for himself the finishing, the varnish applied with a flit gun, the signature and the sale. Training was graded: an apprentice first filled in the outlines, then moved on to stippling, and only later was allowed to invent creatures of his own. All of them were paid for the work they did, and how much is the disputed point: Chica remembered being given thirty cruzeiros for a picture sold for a hundred.
Each of them left a mark on the repertoire: Babá's mandala-like algae, Ivan's mythological animals, Claudionor's human figures, Chica's rosettes and Raimundo Neto's monochrome gradients. Babá's handling became the standard the whole school worked towards, and some thought it better than the master's.