Biography

Chico da Silva was a master of Brazilian naïve painting.

Origins on the Alto Tejo

Chico da Silva was born around 1910 on the Alto Tejo, by the banks of the Tejo river in the Acre Territory, near the Peruvian border. The year is uncertain. He had no birth certificate, and the dates he gave changed with the telling. His father was an Indigenous Peruvian, his mother a woman from Ceará who had followed the rubber boom into the Amazon. While Chico was still a boy the family went back to Ceará, and after years in the interior they settled in Fortaleza.

He took the name Francisco Domingos da Silva and lived in Pirambu, at the time a stretch of dunes and fishermen’s shacks on the city’s west side. Before he painted he made a living as he could: cobbler, clog-maker, umbrella-mender, watch repairer. Around 1937 he began drawing on the whitewashed walls of the shacks at Praia Formosa, in charcoal, chalk and red clay: fish, serpents, birds, ghost ships.

Chabloz and gouache

In 1943 the Swiss critic Jean-Pierre Chabloz, in Fortaleza for the wartime rubber campaign, saw the walls and went looking for the man who had painted them. He gave Chico paper, gouache and brushes and bought his work. Chico’s first gouaches reached the salons of Fortaleza and Rio, and by the early 1950s Chabloz had carried them to Geneva, Lausanne and Paris, where the magazine Cahiers d’Art announced an Indian who had reinvented painting. In 1966 it was Chabloz who carried Chico’s work to the 33rd Venice Biennale, where it received an honourable mention. Chico himself was never there.

Pirambu School

Over time gouache gave way to acrylic, and the bestiary grew bolder: roosters, two-headed birds, dragons devouring their own tails. In Pirambu a circle of young painters formed around him and took up his motifs and his colour. Garcia (José dos Santos Gomes), the last of them still living (2026), painted roosters and winged creatures alongside Ivan (Ivan José de Assis). Claudionor (José Claudionor Nogueira) drew the dragons. He also drew the outlines, the underlying contours of each piece, which the other painters then filled in with colour. Babá (Sebastião Lima da Silva) worked the colour into mandala-like patterns and was known for the quality of his line: they called him “the exhibition painter,” since his paintings were, at the time, the ones most often sent out to shows. Chica, Chico’s own daughter Francisca, filled in the rosettes and applied the varnish with an old hand-pump insecticide sprayer. They became known as the Pirambu School. In 1977 Chico signed a large collective panel, Homens Trabalhando (Men Working), together with five painters of this circle: the master and his circle on one canvas. The panel is now held by the Federal University of Ceará.

Last years and rediscovery

Chico’s last years were hard: illness, hospital stays, a state pension granted in 1983. He died in Fortaleza on 6 December 1985. His work has drawn fresh attention since. In 2023 it was shown at the Pinacoteca de São Paulo, in “Chico da Silva e o ateliê do Pirambu”, and at the Pinacoteca do Ceará, in “Chico da Silva e a Escola do Pirambu”; the same year the David Kordansky Gallery in New York gave him his first show with the gallery.

In the João Cunha Collection, works by Chico da Silva and the Pirambu School are gathered and documented, from the early gouaches on paper to the large acrylics of the Fortaleza years, some under a dual attribution, such as “Chico da Silva por Babá.”