The ascent and decline of Chico da Silva in the global art world offers a sobering lesson. Born in 1910 in the Amazon Rainforest to an Indigenous Peruvian fisherman and a Brazilian woman from Ceará, he was taken to Fortaleza after his father died from a snakebite, and the family settled in the impoverished neighborhood of Pirambu.
During the 1940s, da Silva, who never learned to read or write and whose parents’ names remain unknown, began attracting local attention for mystical, Amazon-inspired murals painted on the exteriors of fishermen’s houses. He used black charcoal, chalk, and natural pigments to create these images. That changed in 1943, when Jean-Pierre Chabloz, a Swiss critic and artist who had come to Brazil because of World War II, traveled to Fortaleza on business and encountered da Silva’s work.
Chabloz soon started providing da Silva with art supplies including gouache, tempera, and canvas, effectively reshaping him into a European’s idea of an artist. From there, the narrative followed a familiar but troubling course. Chabloz succeeded in introducing da Silva’s art to the rest of Brazil, and the recognition eventually led to an honorable mention in the Brazilian pavilion presentation at the 1966 Venice Biennale.
In those paintings, da Silva translated his visionary world of enchanted animals, fantastical flora and fauna, and magical lines and patterns onto canvas and paper using gouache and tempera. Yet rather than completing the transformation and becoming an artist, or an “inspired genius” in Western eyes, he remained rooted in his community and founded the Pirambu School, an informal workshop in the neighborhood that had supported him.
There, he taught neighbors to paint in his style and signed the works as his own, angering Chabloz, who dismissed the workshop output as “fake” and brought an end to the art world’s interest in da Silva. Less than two decades later, he died in poverty and obscurity.
