Francisco Da Silva

Francisco da Silva (Alto Tejo, AC, 1910 - Fortaleza, CE, 1985)

Francisco da Silva was a painter and illustrator. He began drawing with charcoal and chalk on the walls and walls of fishermen's huts around 1937 in Fortaleza, Ceará. In the 1940s, encouraged by the Swiss critic and painter Jean Pierre Chabloz, he began painting in gouache. In 1945, he exhibited at the Askanasy Gallery in Rio de Janeiro, alongside Chabloz, Antônio Bandeira, and Inimá de Paula. Between 1961 and 1963, he worked at the newly created Art Museum of the Federal University of Ceará (UFCE). After spending four years in a psychiatric hospital, he returned to painting in 1981.

Criticism

"He maintains those visions and figures originating from popular Amazonian fables, altered by a prodigious imagination. He is the interpreter of a mythology diluted in the oral tradition of an immense region that only he has captured and reflected upon. He certainly adds subjective imagery, drawn from the conflicts of his rough soul (...). Another relevant aspect (...) is the visual quality of a well-ordered and constructed composition, highlighting the decorative elements of folk art. The graphics, the design weave, the polychromy, and the enrichment of detail are striking characteristics."
Clarival Valadares
PONTUAL, Roberto. Dictionary of Visual Arts in Brazil. Introduction by Antônio Houaiss. Texts by Mário Barata et al. Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 1969.

"The great Chico da Silva was the one who, magically unleashing his Amazonian experience, brought to painting a world populated by archetypal narratives, originating from oral tradition and his instinctive antennae to the collective unconscious. In this world, dominance fell to an aggressive and fantastical fauna, with birds, dragons, fish, spiders, and other less recognizable animals devouring one another, almost always amidst a primeval sea. There, the tension of a mandala and decorative joy knew how to combine in a thousand wonders."
Roberto Pontual
PONTUAL, Roberto. Between Two Centuries: 20th-Century Brazilian Art in the Gilberto Chateaubriand Collection. Foreword by Gilberto Allard Chateaubriand and Antônio Houaiss. Introduction by 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 for an art so spontaneous and that has always remained essentially primitive, despite its oscillations (...)".
Jean Pierre Chabloz
CHICO da Silva: do deliírio ao dilúvio = from delirium to diluvium. Translated by Lincoln Machado and Michael R. Eastman. Text by Roberto Galvão. Fortaleza: Espaço Cultural do Palácio da Abolição, 1990.

Solo Exhibitions

1950 - Lausanne (Switzerland) - Solo exhibition at the Pour L'Art Gallery
1961 - Fortaleza, CE - Solo exhibition at the Diários Associados Headquarters
1963 - Rio de Janeiro, RJ - Solo exhibition at the Relevo Gallery
1965 - Rio de Janeiro, RJ - Solo exhibition at the Goeldi Gallery
1965 - São Paulo, SP - Solo exhibition at the Selearte Gallery
1965 - Salvador, BA - Solo exhibition at the Querino Gallery
1966 - Rio de Janeiro, RJ - Solo exhibition at the Petite Galerie
1966 - Venice, Italy - Solo exhibition - special mention
1966 - Moscow (USSR - present-day Russia) - Solo exhibition
1967 - Rio de Janeiro, RJ - Solo exhibition at the Gemini and Dezon Galleries
1967 - São Paulo, SP - Solo show, at A Galeria

Group Exhibitions

1943 - Fortaleza, CE - April Salon
1944 - Fortaleza, CE - 3rd Ceará Salon of Painting
1945 - Rio de Janeiro, RJ - Exhibition with Chabloz, Antônio Bandeira, and Inimá de Paula, at the Askanasy Gallery
1949 - Geneva (Switzerland) - Beauregard Salon
1956 - Neuchâtel (Switzerland) - Brazilian Exhibition of Folk and Popular Art, at the Ethnographic Museum
1965 - Paris (France) - Eight Brazilian Naive Painters, at the Jaques Massol Gallery
1966 - Europe - Brazilian Primitive Artists - traveling
1966 - Paris (France) - Unusual Brazil, at the Maison Janson
1966 - Madrid (Spain) - Brazilian Primitives, at the Institute of Hispanic Culture
1966 - Venice (Italy) - 33rd Venice Biennale
1967 - São Paulo SP - 9th International Biennial of São Paulo, at the Bienal Foundation
1970 - Fortaleza CE - 20th April Salon
1972 - São Paulo SP - Art/Brazil/Today: 50 Years Later, at the Collectio Gallery
1977 - Fortaleza CE - 27th April Salon
1978 - Fortaleza CE - 28th April Salon - special room
1978 - Penápolis SP - 3rd Noroeste Visual Arts Salon, at the Penápolis Educational Foundation. Faculty of Philosophy, Sciences and Letters of Penápolis
1978 - São Paulo, SP - 1st Latin American Biennial of São Paulo, at the Biennial Foundation
1984 - Fortaleza, CE - 3rd National Visual Arts Salon - special room

Posthumous Exhibitions

1988 - Rio de Janeiro, RJ - The Fascinating World of Naive Painters, at the Imperial Palace
1989 - Fortaleza, CE - Chico da Silva Retrospective: From Delirium to Deluge, at the Cultural Space of the Abolition Palace
1996 - Osasco, SP - FIEO Expo: donation by Luiz Ernesto Kawall, at the Fieo University Center
2001 - São Paulo, SP - Instant Biographies, at Casa das Rosas
2002 - São Paulo, SP - Santa Ingenuidade, at Unifieo
2002 - São Paulo, SP - Pop Brasil: Popular Art and the Popular in Art, at the CCBB
2002 - Piracicaba, SP - 6th Naive Biennial of Brazil, at Sesc