MILAN.- The walls at SECCI Gallery in Milan are filled with images of fierce animals, monsters, and dragons with multicolored bodies. These are works by the artists Chico da Silva (Alto Tejo, Acre, Brazil, 1922 – Fortaleza, Ceará, Brazil, 1985) and Jordy Kerwick (1982, Australia), who created their work in different times and contexts, but are now brought together in a powerful dialogue.
This is the second presentation of Da Silva’s work in Italy (the first was at the Venice Biennale in 1966, an edition that included a number of other Brazilian artists considered “naive”), and the second presentation of Kerwick’s work in Milan.
The exhibition both connects Chico da Silva to a contemporary poetics — and in this sense, represents a new step in the international recognition of Da Silva, an artist whose work was forgotten by the art world for decades — and associates Jordy Kerwick with a tradition of bestial imagery. Together, the paintings uphold an imaginative freedom, permeated by a chimera of beings emerging from the restless and creative minds of both artists.
In Brazilian art, Chico da Silva’s trajectory is unique: the artist was born in the Amazon rainforest in 1922, the son of a woman from Ceará and a Peruvian indigenous man. As a child, he moved to Fortaleza, the capital of the state of Ceará, where he developed his body of work. Drawing spontaneously his birds and winged dragons on the walls of houses in the city’s coastal region, he attracted the attention of Swiss art critic Jean Pierre Chabloz, who introduced him to movable formats and brought his work to Europe. His production influenced not only other artists but also the community around him. Chico was a kind of master, with disciples who created in their own way, a phenomenon now known as the School of Pirambu (Pirambu is the name of the peripheral neighborhood in Fortaleza where Chico lived for most of his life).
Kerwick, in turn, creates paintings that digest canonical references from the History of Art, such as Henri Matisse and Henri Rousseau, in scenes wrapped in a pop aesthetic, where figures coexist both in nature and in domestic or urban environments. His scenes suggest a kind of delirious theater. Unlike Chico, who often merges figure and background through pointillist construction, Kerwick’s beings appear in the foreground with patterns covering their bodies, contrasting with the compositions in the background. In these creatures, it is difficult to distinguish what is skin and what is costume or characterization. This categorization becomes even more blurred in the three-dimensional objects Kerwick brings into the space: for while they are sculptures, they are also masks.
While Chico sometimes said that his compositions developed from his childhood memories in the tropical, lush nature of the Amazon, Kerwick also draws from his own childhood imagination as a key reference for building his poetics. The playful world of his two children frequently serves as inspiration for the artist and motivates one of the characteristics for which he is most known: the two-headed characters.
In both artists, nature is bestial, with enormous eyes and sharp teeth, ready to attack. Chico and Kerwick remind us that nature is not tamed; it is an eternal struggle between the strong and the weak, between what survives and what is devoured. Even so, it can be a source of beauty and inspiration, an invitation to both lose oneself and be found.
Thierry Freitas is an art historian and curator at the Pinacoteca of São Paulo. In 2023, he organized the most comprehensive retrospective of Chico da Silva’s work, which was presented in São Paulo and Ceará.
Francisco Domingos da Silva, known as Chico da Silva, was born in Alto Tejo, in the Brazilian state of Acre, the son of a Peruvian Indian and a woman from the state of Ceará. The year of his birth, based on research from different sources, is inconclusive, but it is estimated that the artist was born in 1910 (Fundação Bienal de São Paulo) or 1922 (Catalog of his first solo show in Fortaleza, 1961; Estrigas, 1988). Chico da Silva, from a very young age, traveled throughout the north and northeast of Brazil before settling in Fortaleza, Ceará.
In the early 1940s, he began drawing with charcoal and chalk on the walls of the cottages in Praia Formosa [Formosa Beach]. In 1943, Chico met the Swiss painter Jean-Pierre Chabloz (1910-1984), who introduced him to the local art circuit. In the same year, he participated in the collective exhibition Salão de Abril [April Saloon], followed by the 3rd Salão Cearense de Belas Artes, in 1944. Barboza Leite, referring to Chico’s early production in his book “Esquema da Pintura no Ceará [Painting Scheme in Ceará]”(1949), described it as follows “[…] the imprecise, nebulous forms, but dosed with a poetic intensity to the whole surface, of F. Silva’s paintings”.
In 1945, Chabloz exhibited paintings by Chico da Silva alongside Antonio Bandeira (1922-1967) and Inimá de Paula (1918-1999) at Galeria Askanasy in Rio de Janeiro. Over the next three years, the Swiss artist made occasional trips to Europe, returning to the continent permanently in 1948. Chabloz dedicated himself to promoting Chico’s work, staging his first solo show at the Galerie Pour L’Art, Lausanne, in 1952. In December of the same year, he published the article “Un Indien brésilien ré-invente la Peinture [A Brazilian Indian reinvents painting]” in the prestigious art magazine Cahiers D’Art, managed by Christian Zervos.
The departure of his friend and mentor had a great impact on Chico da Silva’s production, and during Chabloz’s stay in Europe, he held a small number of exhibitions in Brazil. Continuing his representation abroad, he participated in 1956 in the exhibition Arts primitifs et modernes brésiliens at the Musée d’ethnographie de Neuchâtel, Switzerland. The beginning of the 1960s marked Chabloz’s return to Brazil for a short period – the Swiss returned to Europe in July 1960, where he stayed for two years – which facilitated Chico’s reintegration into the group of artists from Fortaleza.
On April 10th, 1961, Chico da Silva opened his first solo show in Brazil, which took place at the Sede dos Diários Associados, in Fortaleza, where he presented ten works. According to the text of the catalog presented by the then Governor Parsifal Barroso, his “mysterious stories of the jungles, where animals and accidents of nature interfere as if they were human creatures […] represent the best phase of the painter, especially for the coloring, imagination, and movement of the themes”.
In 1959, Chico da Silva was hired by UFC – The Federal University of Ceará to develop the activities of MAUC – Art Museum of the Federal University of Ceará. His participation at the University lasted until 1963, when he exhibited at Galeria Relevo, in Rio de Janeiro, through the intermediation of Jean Boghici (1928-2015). In the same year, he approached Henrique Bluhm, who began the process of commercializing his work. It was during this period that Chico da Silva established his image as the Mestre da Escola do Pirambu [Master of the Pirambu School], working closely with young artists interested in learning the craft of painting. In 1965, he participated in the exhibition 8 peintres naïfs brèsiliens at Galerie Jacques Massol in Paris.
In 1966, through the efforts of Clarival do Prado Valadares, owner of Galeria Goeldi, Chico was included in the delegation that represented Brazil at the 33rd Venice Biennale, where he received an Honorable Mention. In the exhibition catalog, his work is described based on a meticulous technique that “whether in detail or in color, brings together a sophistication of the physical and subjective medium of painting”. In a letter written to Haroldo Juaçaba, Clarival described the Venice experience as follows: “I fought hard for Chico. After seeing the four paintings (panels) exhibited, Jacques Lanaipre came to me secretly and asked me to show to five members of the jury the works by Chico that were not exhibited: exactly those twelve gouaches from the Art Museum of the Federal University of Ceará. It was a revelation. They said that if Brazil had made a room for the Indian, the result would be different”.
The late 1960s are marked by episodes in which different apprentices claimed authorship of his works, causing Chico da Silva’s mental and physical health to deteriorate. In 1972, he was included in the show Arte/Brasil/Hoje: 50 Anos Depois, at the Collectio Gallery, in São Paulo, followed by his participation in the 1st Latin American Biennial of São Paulo, at the Fundação Bienal, in 1978. In the last phase of his career, Chico continued to hold solo and group exhibitions in different Brazilian states, including Recife, Brasília, São Paulo, Minas Gerais, and Rio de Janeiro.
In 1983, due to thrombosis, his health was completely debilitated. Chico da Silva died in Fortaleza in 1985. Since his death, he is considered a “primitivist genius” in Brazil, and his work fuses popular cosmologies from the north and northeast of the country. His concern with the exaltation of Brazilian fauna and flora is evident not only as a decorative element but as a formal expression of the organic subjectivity of the Amazon region and its complexities.
Jordy Kerwick (b. 1982, Melbourne, Australia) is a self-taught artist who began his painting career in 2016. Kerwick has quickly acquired global recognition for his bold, raw and unapologetic approach to palette and pattern, executing vivid, expressionistic and highly-stylised compositions.
Domestic objects, predatory animals, and mythical beasts – taxidermy rugs ornamented with geometric markings, double headed king cobras, ferocious fanged tigers, and feather-maned unicorns – populate his figurative canvases and create a contemporary folklore or fable that is playful, kinetic and arcane. Known for his colourful, eclectic still-life paintings, Kerwick’s latest body of work explores the fantastical elements and storied visions of the artist’s interior imagination where new and unknown terrains collide. Using a variety of materials, from oil, acrylic and spray paint on canvas, to oil stick and collage on paper, the artist’s “the more mistakes, the merrier” approach rejoices in the fortuitous relationships that arise between unexpected combinations of colour, texture, and form.
Kerwick’s striking visual language stems largely from his homebody, domestic lifestyle. Art historical references are entangled with ancient iconography. Symbols from Egyptian art combine with tropes from popular culture, such as the bold and electrifying color schemes of comic book series’ heroes and villains. Beyond the wondrous pictorial worlds and fantastical figurative characters that repeatedly populate the artist’s canvases, Kerwick carefully considers the gestural and the abstract in his nuanced construction of richly tactile, courageously vibrant, and flattened compositions. His fresh, authentic lexicon of shapes and colour absorbs influence from the heavy-weight hitters of Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, and Hard-edge painting, citing Robert Motherwell, Helen Frankenthaler, Adolph Gottlieb, Agnes Martin, and the modern genius of Henri Matisse as artists who infiltrate his visual impulse.
Recent solo exhibitions include Allouche Benais Gallery, Athens, Greece (2021); Galerie Julie Cadet, Paris, France (2021); Union Gallery, London, England (2021); Pt. 2 Gallery, Oakland, California (2021, 2019); Piermarq*, Sydney, Australia (2020, 2018); Anna Zorina Gallery, New York (2019); a dual show at Masahiro Maki Gallery, Tokyo, Japan and Paris, France (2019); TW Fine Art, Brisbane, Australia (2019); and Delphian Gallery, London, United Kingdom (2018).
Kerwick lives and works in Albi, France.
