“I am Brazil,” the painter José Antonio da Silva often said. But the country he depicted was not the country on the postcards.
Instead of sweaty bodies on beaches and jubilant revelers at Carnival, he transferred rural daily life within São Paulo to canvas, placing at the heart of his artistic practice an environment placed on the margins of national life.
This central importance of the interior can be seen in exhibitions at the Estacão Gallery and at the São Paulo Museum of Contemporary Art, where “Brazil Painting” is on display – an exhibition bringing together 142 works by Silva, known as the Brazilian Van Gogh.
This quality is explained by the meeting points between the painters’ works. “Both were fairly marginal figures who had a strong relationship with the landscape and the poor,” says Gabriel Pérez Barreiro, who curated the exhibition at MAC.
“Van Gogh’s great works depict the postman and people who work the land. He had a deep respect for the humble aspects of life, which Silva did as well.”
The production bears similarities not only in theme, but also in form. This is evident in paintings with brilliant colors and expressive brushstrokes, which can be seen most clearly in his self-portraits.
In the MAC gallery, it is possible to see that Silva depicted himself through thick layers of paint, in the style of the Dutch artist. “Despite the difference between the Netherlands in the 19th century and the state of São Paulo in the 20th century, there are some similarities that make this comparison between the two logical.”
For the curator, Silva’s self-portraits are also important because they highlight the political vitality of his production.
“It represents a region, a culture and the concept of freedom,” says Pérez Barreiro, adding that some of these works bear the green and yellow colors of the Brazilian flag. “This color palette based on the colors of the flag is almost a statement. He has managed to position the look itself as a symbol of the country’s vision.”
Portraits convey not only subjective messages, but also objective ones. In one of the works, the artist appears carrying a mask that says, “This mouth is tied. It was the Biennial that tied me down.”
Throughout his career, the painter had a turbulent relationship with the São Paulo Biennale, the most important art fair in Brazil.
This friendly relationship began in 1951, when Silva presented some of his works at the exhibition. Although his work ran through six more editions, he became a harsh critic after his works were rejected in other years.
In a way, this campaign against the Biennale was a symptom of his efforts to oppose Brazil’s intellectual elites. He added, “Silva faced the major economic, cultural and political forces in the country. He did not lower his head because he is an artist who came from a humble background.”
He was born in the municipality of Siles Oliveira, in the interior of São Paulo, and taught himself to draw while working on coffee plantations. In his youth, he covered the walls of his house with paintings, which earned him a reputation for madness.
In 1946, he participated in his first exhibition in São José do Rio Preto, where he had moved a few years earlier. Since then, his work has begun to attract the attention of critics and curators. In 1951, he received a prize from the Museum of Modern Art in New York, MoMA, and the following year, he participated in the Venice Biennale, the most important exhibition in the world.
Despite all this status, the artist did not change his identity to fit within the artistic circle. “At a certain point, selling the paintings made Silva a wealthy person. However, he continued to live in the community he loved, and did not move to Avenida Atlantica, for example.”
Due to his lack of education, the artist expressed himself in Portuguese which did not follow the cultural norm. But he did not insist on changing the way he spoke. With this Portuguese artist wrote books such as “Maria Clara”, “Sou Pintor, Sou Poeta” and “Fazenda da Boa Esperança”. One of the most prominent features of the exhibition is “Romance da Minha Vida,” Silva’s first book, in which he collected 76 drawings.
“It was a political gesture to demand a certain form of speech and show that this form of expression has beauty,” says the curator. “He does not correct his own texts or take Portuguese lessons to change the way he speaks.” “These choices are certainly intimate, but they are also political.”
Some of Silva’s decisions also revealed an eccentric personality with a great ability for personal marketing. He called himself a genius, considered cutting off his ear like Van Gogh, and even destroyed his paintings in front of journalists after deciding to change his style.
Silva was actually known for his aesthetic versatility. This can be seen in the exhibition through works ranging from pointillism through still life to works in dialogue with abstraction, as is the case with “Vendaval” and “Ovelhas na Chuva”.
“He managed to create a language without necessarily having a closed style,” says Pérez-Barrero. “Through the exhibition, I wanted to show the diversity of techniques and themes in his production.”
Different sides of the painter can also be seen at the Estação Gallery west of São Paulo. There are 26 works produced between the 1940s and 1980s that depict life in the countryside.
Due to the artist’s origins and the repetition of rural areas in his works, Silva became known as a folk painter.
The gallery’s founder, Velma Eid, rejects this classification to reinforce social hierarchies in the art world. “Fortunately, this term has become obsolete. There is bad art and good art.”
For the gallery owner, Silva’s production was representative of this second group. “He depicts the life he lived in the countryside on canvas with great mastery and skill,” Eid says. “Even when he depicts other subjects, such as still life or Rio de Janeiro, the rural world does not leave him.” “The beauty of Silva’s painting is precisely that it leads us towards the world he inhabits.”