Chico da Silva (also known as Francisco da Silva) is one of the most influential and widely exhibited indigenous Brazilian artists. He was born surrounded by the Amazon rainforest in Alto Tejo, but while still a child he moved to Ceara, in northeastern Brazil. In 1935 he settled in Fortaleza where he lived until his death. He started his artistic production spontaneously by drawing and painting on the walls of fishermen's houses in Praia Formosa. In his gouaches and paintings, Chico da Silva represented mainly the creatures of the forest, such as Amazon birds and fish, as well as fanciful figures, such as dragons. His artworks give form to stories and mythologies from the oral tradition of Northern Brazilian culture, in compositions marked by rich polychromy and by the graphic details of the drawing, composed of colorful wefts and lines.
We saw an Amazonian, creative and pure ancestry in the realization of his painting inhabited by a fantastic fauna. Today, with the climate issue on the planet becoming more and more worrying, we can find a surprisingly current parallel in the themes painted by Chico. A warning cry, coming from these beings, that we need to know how to live with nature. Beings are being extinguished by the felling of the forest, itself much more deadly than the death poetically represented in the food chains painted in his works. In the artist's work, colors play a magical role and the fauna comes to life in our consciousness.