The Instituto Oboé and the Pirambu Revival

How the Instituto Cultural Oboé reunited Chico da Silva's disciples in Fortaleza and revived the Escola do Pirambu in 34 canvases from 2004 to 2011.

Chico da Silva died in Fortaleza on 6 December 1985. The circle that had painted with him in the Pirambu district had scattered long before that. Almost twenty years after the painter’s death, a finance company in Fortaleza, Ceará, with an art gallery of its own, brought three of the disciples back to the canvas. The paintings that came out of that reunion form a distinct nucleus of the João Cunha Collection: thirty-four canvases, most of them dated between 2004 and 2011.

A workshop dispersed

The Escola do Pirambu never had a building or a charter. It was the group around Chico’s house: Babá (Sebastião Lima da Silva), Claudionor (José Claudionor Nogueira), Garcia (José dos Santos Gomes), Ivan, and Chica, the painter’s daughter. How that group formed and worked is told in the Pirambu school; what matters here is how it came apart. The authenticity disputes of the 1970s weighed on Claudionor, who years later stopped painting canvases, according to the presentation his daughter, the journalist Erika Cavalcanti, wrote for his memoir, published in the 2024 volume A Escola do Pirambu: um legado de Chico da Silva (organized by Flávia Muluc). His own chapters tell what came instead: decades decorating clubs and June and Carnival festivities, from Fortaleza to the interior towns. Garcia left for São Paulo in 1973, returned two years later and spent the following decades as a supermarket butcher in Fortaleza; in an interview with the Fortaleza channel TVDD in February 2026, he placed his definitive return to painting around the year 2000.

A finance company with a gallery

The sources name the patron in two ways. Erika Cavalcanti’s presentation calls it the Instituto Cultural Oboé; Claudionor’s own chapter and Garcia’s memory have simply Oboé, a finance company run by Newton Freitas that kept a large gallery in Fortaleza and exhibited often. Garcia told TVDD that Gerardo da Silva, a grandson of Chico da Silva, introduced him to the house, and that he painted for it for three or four years, canvases of every size, down to fifteen by twenty centimetres.

Erika Cavalcanti dates the reunion behind that arrangement to mid-2004, when her father reconnected with Garcia and Babá. Claudionor, writing in 2010, gave the episode its name: chapter 16 of his memoir is titled “O Renascimento da Escola do Pirambu”, the rebirth of the Pirambu school, and in it he describes Oboé, in the person of Newton Freitas, as a client who believed in the disciples of Chico da Silva. In her presentation, Erika Cavalcanti records what his last years produced beyond canvases: clay jars and plates, and an art workshop in Sobral, the pilot of a project that took art to public squares.

The 2004–2011 nucleus

The João Cunha Collection holds thirty-four paintings from this cycle, all acrylic on canvas: twenty-seven by Babá, whose dated canvases run from 2004 to 2011; six by Claudionor, five of them dated 2007 and 2008; and one by Gerardo da Silva, a canvas of roosters from 1998. The materials measure the distance from the first workshop. In the 1960s, as Garcia recalls in the documentary Memória e Imaginário (2024), Chico pinned sheets of card to the wall and the group filled them with gouache; forty years later the disciples worked in acrylic, on stretched canvases that cluster around 75 by 100 centimetres. The repertoire, though, is the one fixed in Pirambu: dragons, birds, fish, snakes, fighting roosters. The earliest dated canvas in the group, Babá’s Dragão, Aves e Insetos (Dragon, Birds and Insects), was finished on 18 August 2004, inside the same mid-2004 window Erika Cavalcanti gives for the reunion.

Two names on one label

The canvases by Babá and Claudionor enter the catalogue under a double credit: Chico da Silva by Babá, Chico da Silva by Claudionor; the Gerardo da Silva roosters carry his name alone. The disciple is the author; the master’s name states the visual language the painting speaks. The formula follows the way the school itself operated, and it leaves open, on purpose, the question the Brazilian press argued over in the 1970s: where Chico’s hand ended and where his disciples’ began. Garcia’s own criterion, stated in the 2024 documentary, covers the early years: everything painted in Chico’s house, under his orientation and with his signature, he counts as original. The Oboé canvases are a different case. Chico had been dead for nearly twenty years and each painter signed his own name; what stayed common was the animal grammar of the Escola do Pirambu.

Babá is the largest presence in the nucleus, with twenty-seven canvases. Garcia, in the same documentary, remembers him as the painstaking one of the workshop, fond of fine, delicate finishing. A canvas like Ave e Insetos (Bird and Insects), dated 26 May 2006, shows that care concentrated on a single bird surrounded by insects.

After the revival

Claudionor began writing his memoir at the start of 2010, by his daughter’s account, and died on 18 October of that year; the text reached print in 2024. The latest canvas by Babá in the collection is dated 2011, and the nucleus closes there. Oboé itself did not last much longer: Garcia told TVDD that the company ran into financial trouble and that its art holdings went to auction. He added an epilogue of his own. A buyer once brought him two canvases acquired at Oboé and asked for a certificate; Garcia answered that his name was already on them. Of the three painters the institute reunited, he is the one still at work, the subject of Garcia, the last disciple.

The thirty-four paintings of the Oboé years are listed in the paintings index, beside the works Chico da Silva signed himself; how the two groups are documented is set out on the collection page.