Nottingham Contemporary provides a chance to assess – through 36 paintings strikingly installed on orange walls – the self-taught Brazilian artist Chico da Silva (c. 1922- 85). His visual lexicon and pictorial grammar emerged from a direct engagement with two distinct worlds as grew up in the north-eastern Atlantic-facing state of Sergipe: his father’s Amazonian environment and his mother’s coastal one. That’s reflected in the show distinguishing between ‘Water’, Land’ and ‘Fantasy’, though there is usually a fair degree of fantasy in his hybridized forms: some animals start with observation and can be traced to their origins, others seem more outlandish. Either way, Chico’s flatly colourful and inventive style is instantly appealing.
That personal cosmology is one way in which the work goes beyond conventional representations of wildlife, and I’d add two others. First, the creatures are at one with their environments – often to the extent of taking on plant-like features, such as in markings, or even frond-matching tongues. Second, the animals interact strongly with each other – they are, if you like, collective depictions, some way from the presentation of species in the individualist manner of guidebooks, where they are separated for optimum identification. The birds above, for example, seem to be to males fighting for the attention of the third, a female. Open mouths are the centre of the activity, with the cast often attempting to eat each other – yet in a sufficiently characterful way that the violence involved doesn’t contradict the joyful atmosphere of works such as that from 1972. I like the description of Chico as a ‘speculative fabulist’, calling future-oriented attention to the interconnectedness of all things – and his creativity extended to inventing words as well as worlds.
That can be contrasted with how the Swiss dealer Jean Pierre Chabloz presented him: as a primitive voice he brought to civilisation and modernity after discovering his charcoal drawings on walls and huts in 1943. It was Chabloz who encouraged Chico to work in colourful gouache on paper, only to return to Sweden in the 50’s. Chico reverted to manual labour, until Chabloz took him up again in 1960, and his star rose – in 1966 he became the first Indigenous artist to be exhibited at the Venice Biennale. Demand for Chico’s work escalated to the extent that he set up a studio system in Pirambu – so that many works are effectively collective – and locals also took the chance to make unofficial paintings in his style. That muddied the narrative of originality beloved of the art market, even though it could also be seen as a telling rejection of Eurocentric conventions and not so far from what Koons, Hirst et al would do shortly afterwards. Either way, Chico’s market fell away in the 1970’s: add the problems caused by mental health issues and alcoholism, and he died a poor man in 1985. This century, however, he has received renewed attention, and this first European institutional solo exhibition is part of that welcome trend.
Chico da Silva: And the soul is for the birds, curated by Salma Tuqan and Niall Ó Faircheallaigh, continues at Nottingham Contemporary to 6th Sept, alongside Augustas Serapinas: Physical Culture, which is also well worth seeing.
Paul Carey-Kent selects a ‘Gallery of the Month’, a ‘Show of the Month’, a ‘Work of the Month’ and a ‘Book of the Month’ for his weekly column in FAD. A collection of previous gallery columns, ‘Paul’s Galleries To Go’, is available from FAD Bazaar.
