José Leonilson

Biography

In 1993 Leonilson conceived an installation for the Capela do Morumbi in São Paulo: light white fabrics, soft shirts draped over chairs, embroidered inscriptions “of false morality” and “of a good heart”, and beside them “Lazarus”. It was his last work.

José Leonilson Bezerra Dias was born on 1 March 1957 in Fortaleza, in the state of Ceará. In 1961 the family moved to São Paulo. His father was a cloth merchant and his mother embroidered, so this world of thread and material was familiar to him from childhood, although he came to sewing in art only years later.

From 1977 he studied art education at the Fundação Armando Álvares Penteado (FAAP) under Julio Plaza, Nelson Leirner and Regina Silveira; by some accounts the course ran until 1980, by others until 1981. Later he took watercolour lessons from Dudi Maia Rosa at the Aster art school. In 1979 he took part in his first group exhibition, “Desenho Jovem” (Young Drawing), at the Museum of Contemporary Art of the University of São Paulo, and in 1980 in “Panorama da Arte Atual Brasileira” (Panorama of Current Brazilian Art) at the Museum of Modern Art in São Paulo. He is counted among the Geração 80 (Generation 80), the artists who restored the pleasure of painting after decades of constructivism and conceptualism. In 1981 he travelled abroad for the first time. In Madrid his first solo exhibition opened at the Galería Casa do Brasil, and then he visited other European cities. In Milan the artist Antonio Dias introduced him to the critic Achille Bonito Oliva, and the Italian Transavantgarde, with its figuration, mythology and expressive colour, left a clear mark on his early work. In 1982 he was again in Italy, Germany and Portugal and showed work in Bologna; in 1983 two solo exhibitions were held, in São Paulo and in Rio de Janeiro. In 1985 he took part in the biennials in São Paulo and Paris.

Leonilson’s work is largely autobiographical and is concentrated in the last ten years of his life. Lisette Lagnado wrote that each piece is built like a letter in a private diary. These sheets and canvases, sparely composed and often unframed, are closer to drawing than to painting. Brazil’s military dictatorship (1964–1985) had not yet ended, and his open subject, the life of a gay man, ran against both the regime and the Catholic Church.

In 1989, at the exhibition “Anotações de Viagem” (Travel Notes) at the Galeria Luisa Strina, he showed pieces made of buttons, semi-precious stones and embroidery. That was how sewing entered his work. Critics linked it to the embroideries of Arthur Bispo do Rosário, whom he admired, and to the textiles of the American Shakers; Hélio Oiticica’s “Parangolé” is named as another point of reference. To my mind the main explanation is simpler: thread and cloth had been with him since childhood.

In 1990 he travelled to London, New York, Paris, Venice and Amsterdam, began recording his thoughts on tape for a future book, which his friend Ricardo Ferreira later put together, and received the Brasília Prize for Visual Arts at the National Salon. From March 1991 until May 1993 he made illustrations for Barbara Gancia’s weekly column in the newspaper Folha de S. Paulo. In August 1991 it emerged that he was HIV-positive; this subject long shaped his work.

“34 with Scars” (1991) is a self-portrait: an empty piece of voile on which black scars and his age are embroidered, in acrylic, thread and plastic tacks; it is held by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In the series of seven drawings “O Perigoso” (The Dangerous One, 1992), the first sheet carries a drop of his blood, and the others small hands, crosses and the names of flowers. In “El Puerto” (1992) a mirror is covered with a patch of his shirt, with his age, weight and height embroidered in blue thread. The best-known late work is “O Penelope” (1993), ten panels of translucent fabrics, white and pale blue, with uneven stitches and an embroidered empty chair at the edge. The title joins the masculine article “O” to a feminine name; the waiting Penelope becomes, in his hands, a waiting man. The work is held by Tate Modern in London.

Leonilson died in São Paulo on 28 May 1993. In the same year his family and friends founded the Projeto Leonilson to preserve and catalogue his archive. In 1994 he was posthumously awarded the prize of the São Paulo Association of Art Critics (APCA) for a solo exhibition at the Galeria São Paulo and for the installation at the Capela do Morumbi. At the 1998 São Paulo Biennial he was given a room of his own, and in the autumn of 2017 the Americas Society in New York showed fifty of his late works in the exhibition “José Leonilson: Empty Man”.