Chico da Silva

Francisco Domingos da Silva (c. 1910 – 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.