Snakes
Long snakes coil around branches and trunks and link the other creatures in the scene. They have been in the work of Chico da Silva since the 1940s and continue in the canvases of the disciples of the Pirambu School.
Snakes and serpents
In 1945 the Fortaleza newspaper O Estado wrote about the legendary snakes Chico painted on clay pots. Serpentes das Lages do Rio was in the 1961 exhibition, and in 1973 the painter still counted the “monstrous snakes” among his creatures. Serpente da serra luminosa, a gouache of about 1966, two meters wide, was sold by Sotheby’s in New York in 2023.
In the works in the collection, the snake plays the part of a line: it runs along a branch or a trunk and passes between the birds and the fish. The skin comes in bands or spots, with medallions and dense stippling, and the head has an open mouth with fangs and sun-shaped eyes. In Dragon and Serpent (1973), two striped snakes coil on the branch, and one of them has a bird’s beak.
In the studio, the snakes began to fight one another. Babá put them in many of the Instituto Oboé canvases, such as Birds Insects and Snake; Claudionor painted Snake and Bird in 2007; and Garcia painted Entwined Serpents in 2025, two serpents knotted together.