Francisco da Silva (Alto Tejo AC 1910 - Fortaleza CE 1985)
Francisco da Silva was a painter and draftsman. He began drawing with charcoal and chalk on the walls of fishermen's shacks around 1937, in Fortaleza (Ceará). In the 1940s, encouraged by the Swiss critic and painter Jean Pierre Chabloz, he took up gouache painting. In 1945, he exhibited at Galeria Askanasy, in Rio de Janeiro, alongside Chabloz, Antônio Bandeira and Inimá de Paula. Between 1961 and 1963, he worked at the newly founded Museu de Arte da Universidade Federal do Ceará (UFCE). After spending four years in a psychiatric hospital, he resumed painting in 1981.
Critiques
"He keeps those visions and figures stemming from Amazonian popular fable, altered by a prodigious imagination. He is the interpreter of a mythology diffused in the oral tradition of an immense region, which he alone captured and reflected. He certainly adds a subjective imagery, drawn from the conflicts of his rough soul (...). Another relevant aspect (...) is the visual quality of a well-ordered, well-built composition, enhancing the decorative elements of folk art. The graphic quality, the weave of the drawing, the polychromy and the detailed embellishment are striking features".
Clarival Valadares
PONTUAL, Roberto. Dicionário das artes plásticas no Brasil. Apresentação de Antônio Houaiss. Textos de Mário Barata et al. Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 1969.
"The great Chico da Silva was the one who, magically releasing his Amazonian experience, brought into painting a world peopled with archetypal narratives, stemming from oral tradition and from his instinctive antennae for the collective unconscious. In this world, dominance fell to an aggressive and fantastic fauna, with birds, dragons, fish, spiders and other less recognizable animals devouring one another, almost always amid a primeval sea. There, mandala-like tension and decorative joy knew how to fit together marvelously".
Roberto Pontual
PONTUAL, Roberto. Entre dois séculos: arte brasileira do século XX na coleção Gilberto Chateaubriand. Prefácio de Gilberto Allard Chateaubriand e Antônio Houaiss. Apresentação de M. F. do Nascimento Brito. Rio de Janeiro: Jornal do Brasil, 1987.
"(...) Starting from the purest archaism, the beach painter became classical, baroque, impressionist, and finally modern and even surrealist, if I may use such terms in connection with an art so spontaneous and which always remained essentially primitive, despite its fluctuations (...)".
Jean Pierre Chabloz
CHICO da Silva: do delírio ao dilúvio = from delirium to diluvium. trad. Tradução de Lincoln Machado e Michael R. Eastmam. Texto de Roberto Galvão. Fortaleza: Espaço Cultural do Palácio da Abolição, 1990.
Solo Exhibitions
1950 - Lausanne (Switzerland) - Solo, at Galeria Pour L'Art
1961 - Fortaleza CE - Solo, at Sede dos Diários Associados
1963 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Solo, at Galeria Relevo
1965 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Solo, at Galeria Goeldi
1965 - São Paulo SP - Solo, at Galeria Selearte
1965 - Salvador BA - Solo, at Galeria Querino
1966 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Solo, at Petite Galerie
1966 - Venice (Italy) - Solo - honorable mention
1966 - Moscow (USSR - now Russia) - Solo
1967 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Solo, at Galerias Gemini and Dezon
1967 - São Paulo SP - Solo, at A Galeria
Group Exhibitions
1943 - Fortaleza CE - Salão de Abril [April Salon]
1944 - Fortaleza CE - 3rd Ceará Painting Salon
1945 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Show with Chabloz, Antônio Bandeira and Inimá de Paula, at Galeria Askanasy
1949 - Geneva (Switzerland) - Beauregard Salon
1956 - Neuchâtel (Switzerland) - Brazilian Exhibition of Folk and Popular Art, at Museu Etnográfico
1965 - Paris (France) - Eight Brazilian Naïve Painters, at Galeria Jacques Massol
1966 - Europe - Brazilian Primitive Artists - traveling
1966 - Paris (France) - Unusual Brazil, at Maison Janson
1966 - Madrid (Spain) - Brazilian Primitives, at Instituto de Cultura Hispânica
1966 - Venice (Italy) - 33rd Venice Biennale
1967 - São Paulo SP - 9th Bienal Internacional de São Paulo, at Fundação Bienal
1970 - Fortaleza CE - 20th Salão de Abril [April Salon]
1972 - São Paulo SP - Art/Brazil/Today: 50 Years Later, at Galeria Collectio
1977 - Fortaleza CE - 27th Salão de Abril [April Salon]
1978 - Fortaleza CE - 28th Salão de Abril [April Salon] - special room
1978 - Penápolis SP - 3rd Noroeste Visual Arts Salon, at Fundação Educacional de Penápolis. Faculdade de Filosofia, Ciências e Letras de Penápolis
1978 - São Paulo SP - 1st Latin American Biennial of São Paulo, at Fundação Bienal
1984 - Fortaleza CE - 3rd National Visual Arts Salon - special room
Posthumous Exhibitions
1988 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - The Fascinating World of Naïve Painters, at Paço Imperial
1989 - Fortaleza CE - Chico da Silva Retrospective: From Delirium to Deluge, at Espaço Cultural do Palácio da Abolição
1996 - Osasco SP - Expo FIEO: Luiz Ernesto Kawall Donation, at Centro Universitário Fieo
2001 - São Paulo SP - Instant Biographies, at Casa das Rosas
2002 - São Paulo SP - Santa Ingenuidade [Holy Innocence], at Unifieo
2002 - São Paulo SP - Pop Brasil: Popular Art and the Popular in Art, at CCBB
2002 - Piracicaba SP - 6th Bienal Naïfs do Brasil, at Sesc
Source: Itaú Cultural
