José Antônio da Silva: Landscape and Culture (1950 – 1970)
José Antônio da Silva: Landscape and Culture is an exhibition which consists of a selection of 12 paintings that span his career from the 1950s to 1970s, with a special focus to his landscapes and daily life scenes.
The selection of works emphasizes da Silva’s practice and passion to portrait daily life events and the landscape that surrounded him: cowboys herding cows, town scenes, the way in which trees were cut down to clear a vast area for plantations or trains moving in the landscape.
Our short selection focuses on the relationship between humans and the changing landscape.
José Antônio da Silva: Landscape and Culture (1950 – 1970)
It is with great pleasure that Galeria Estação presents a solo exhibition of the work by José Antônio da Silva at SP Arte – Viewing Room 2021. The exhibition will consist of a selection of 12 paintings that span his career from the 1950s to 1970s, with a special focus to his landscape and daily life scenes.
Brazil has always been prodigious in generating what was conventionally characterized in the 20th century as outsider or primitive artists. Usually self-thought and uncultured people who came from the underclass. Perhaps one of the best known among them in Brazil is José Antônio da Silva. Born in 1909, in Sales de Oliveira, in the rural countryside of São Paulo and died in 1996 in the city of São Paulo, his career spanned the whole of the second half of the 20th century, having its peak in the 50s and 60s when he exhibited several times in the São Paulo Biennial, twice in the Venice Biennale and once at the Carnegie International, among many other places. Although he is extensively collected in Brazil with his paintings are in the most important local institutional collections such as the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP), Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo (MAC) and the Pinacoteca de São Paulo.
José Antônio da Silva always painted fast and in many different styles always maintaining an ability for original plastic solutions. He was very much inspired by the daily life, festivities, religious events and the general landscape of São Paulo’s rural area, which was fast changing throughout the second half of the 20th century. For some, like the art critic Theon Spanudis, “Silva as an artist was just as important as Volpi”, a Brazilian painter who has acquired in the past few years a better international reputation.
Our selection of works focuses on the daily life and events that surrounded da Silva and he painted so well: cowboys herding cows, town scenes, the way in which trees were cut down to clear a vast area for plantations and trains moving in the landscape. Our short selection emphasizes this relationship between humans and the changing landscape.
For a better international understanding, one should understand that unlike da Silva’s contemporaries, urban artists, who were very much involved in a research of geometric abstraction, da Silva’s paintings are connected to artists of high modernism from the first half of the century such as Tarsila do Amaral. His themes were always the religious habits and festivities, the daily life of rural workers and families, the humor from someone who comes from a small town in face of the sophisticated life style in big cities.
Galeria Estação hopes this project contributes to a wider look into the Brazilian culture of the past century.
