Leonilson, untitled, 1989, permanent ink and watercolor on paper, 30 x 21 cm
2024. Leonilson
When I first encountered Leonilson’s visually subtle and poetically breathtaking work in my early twenties, I felt I’d found a lyrical safe haven: Like him, I was a gay man born in a marginal region of Brazil and interested in the sensitive, fiery encounter between image and text. I was struck early on by an essay written by curator Adriano Pedrosa in 1995, two years after Leonilson’s death from AIDS at the age of thirty-six, and two years before I was born. Though I did not know at the time that they’d had a romantic relationship, Pedrosa’s text, “Voilà mon coeur” (There’s My Heart), presented me with new methodological and critical tools for writing about art, rooted in affection rather than in so-called impartial, objective, and rational criticism. I felt similarly during my visits to Pedrosa’s Leonilson retrospective “Agora e as oportunidades” (Now and Opportunities) at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP), which coincided with another, distinctly different curatorial project, Pedrosa’s Venice Biennale exhibition, “Stranieri Ovunque” (Foreigners Everywhere).
Despite his short life, Leonilson is a central figure in Brazilian contemporary art, particularly among the generation of artists who emerged in the 1980s. His diverse body of work—encompassing paintings, drawings, installations, and textiles—rejected the geometric rigor associated with Brazilian Neo-Concretism, embracing an irreverent and unpretentious exploration of gesture, color, and form. Focusing on works from the last five years of the artist’s life, “Agora e as oportunidades” highlighted the devastating and decisive impact of Leonilson’s HIV diagnosis on both his life and his artistic practice, showing the dramatic change in direction of his final works.
The exhibition devoted one room to each year from 1989 to 1993 while a mezzanine displayed a series of illustrations, films, and documents. During these years, the artist explored themes such as the intensity of homosexual love, loneliness and loss, fictionalization of the self, and the adventure of discovering the vast world. In these last works, the artist courageously reflected on the precariousness of gay life during Brazil’s 1980s political dictatorship and the experience of living with HIV, which not only attacked his body but marked him as an “undesirable” subject in Brazilian society. In a 1991 drawing, Os indesejáveis (The Undesirable Ones), Leonilson addressed the bigotry and hatred promoted by extremist and antidemocratic groups, once again on the rise today, with empty glasses standing in for social minorities under the headings THE UNDESIRABLE ONES and THE POISONOUS ONES: HIV carriers, Roma, Indigenous people, prostitutes, and communists. The work that gave the show its title, Agora e as oportunidades, 1991, likewise featured a column of empty glasses representing marginalized subjects, including Black people, gay men, Jews, people with disabilities, and women.
While Leonilson critically confronted the prevailing political situation, he nevertheless grappled with moments of melancholy and surrender. Two works in the show bore the title Leo não consegue mudar o mundo (Leo Can’t Change the World), with the eponymous phrase inscribed on their surfaces, the first a volcanic 1989 painting with a human heart at center against a bloodred ground and the second a spare, hand-embroidered piece on voile from 1991 with text along the upper and lower hems. One could discern a profound human weariness stemming from emotional saturation in works such as Sob o peso dos meus amores (Under the Weight of My Loves), 1990, a self-portrait in the guise of Atlas, depicting the Greek mythological figure burdened with the weight of the universe on his shoulders. Though formally disparate, the three works feature expansive empty areas, emphasizing Leonilson’s sense of insignificance when facing the immense world that envelops him.
The affective and autobiographical connections between the artist and curator were explicitly acknowledged at certain points in the show. In several works, Leonilson depicted a mathematician, a covert reference to Pedrosa, the catalogue explains (when they first met, Leonilson thought Pedrosa studied mathematics). The documentary film A Paixão de JL (The Passion of JL), 2015, included in the show, features recordings of Leonilson repeatedly saying that “Al,” as he nicknamed Pedrosa, was the love of his life. More generally, the pair’s works shared a poetical core: Before he turned to curating, Pedrosa had a conceptual artistic practice of his own, taking up similar themes of love and rejection, autobiography, and textuality, as in Cartas de amor do exílio (parte II) (Love Letters from Exile [Part II]), 1993–95, for which Pedrosa sent six hundred love letters to different men, and displayed laced with red ribbons the ones returned.
Although Leonilson’s practice has a confessional, diaristic aspect, “Agora e as oportunidades” highlighted the artist’s enduring efforts to fictionalize his own life. This inclination manifests in the poetic grandeur that undergirds his narratives—which was also a way to shield intimate aspects that he found challenging to confront directly. In the unostentatious ink-on-paper drawing Favorite Game, 1990, he depicted a male figure standing between the words TRUTH and FICTION—alluding, as the title suggests, to his desire to play with these categories. In the drawing Under Your Spell, I’m Not on Clear Waters, 1991, Leonilson showed a figure gazing down at the surface of the water, looking at a reflection that could be any number of personas: himself, an alter ego, an antihero, a beloved man. Even the artist’s characteristically earnest penmanship, seen frequently in his work, seems potentially inauthentic when compared with the rapid, disheveled handwriting present in his diaries and personal notes, displayed in a documentary vitrine on the museum’s mezzanine.
The motif of the double, central to gay iconology, recurred throughout the exhibition. Sometimes the bodies were connected by their genitals, as in the hugging couple in an untitled 1989 drawing. Other works depict two figures connected at their torsos by a bridge over a running river, as in the painting Jogos perigosos (Dangerous Games), ca. 1990, accompanied by a text reading ESSES JOGOS PERIGOSOS NÃO SÃO GUERRA NEM ESTÃO NO MAR OU NO ESPAÇO MAS POR DETRÁS DE ÓCULOS E UM PAR DE JEANS (These dangerous games are not war nor are they at sea or in space but behind glasses and a pair of jeans). Sometimes, these doubles did not directly touch, like the two towers on stilts in a drawing from 1989, reflecting the fear of infection and transmission of HIV or the impossibility of a platonic love. A profound and tenuous work from 1992 comprised a nearly blank sheet of paper, with only a small circular stain captioned by the words O PERIGOSO (The Dangerous), from which it took its title, and a small L that stood as his signature. The stain is a drop of his own blood, carrying the deadly virus. The series is composed of six additional drawings depicting the treatment’s narrative universe: the finger-pricking for periodic hemograms, the pills, the hopeful rosary. It was paired in the exhibition with a visceral, rapid drawing from 1992 portraying a tangled venous-access device attached to an arm on the reverse side of a small blood-transfusion form from the Hematology Center of São Paulo.
The last room, devoted to the year of the artist’s death, 1993, presents a sublime central installation with the gravity of his farewell to this world: In Instalação sobre duas figuras (Installation on Two Figures), 1993, Leonilson creates his own celebratory funeral mass. Originally installed in the Morumbi Chapel in São Paulo in 1993, the complete work was never seen by the artist, as it was only fully assembled after his death. The spare, quietly ritualistic piece suggests a conclave of ghostlike bodies: There are two chairs dressed in white button-down shirts (embroidered with the phrases DA FALSA MORAL [Of False Morality] and DO BOM CORAÇÃO [Of Good Heart], respectively); a chair covered in a skirtlike cotton sheath; and a coatrack upon which hangs a cloak of white and orange voile and two white men’s shirts joined at the hem, the cuffs falling to the floor. On the latter, at the position of the heart, Leonilson has embroidered the name LASARO, an allusion to Lazarus, the New Testament figure miraculously resurrected by Christ. The doubled shirt seemed to obliquely invoke the figures in another work: Jesus com rapaz acidentado (Jesus with Injured Boy), 1991, in which a haloed Christ holds up the limp, lifeless body of a wounded double, his arms dangling toward the ground. This final installation is at once a utopian wedding, a feared wake, a validating baptism, and a miraculous rebirth. On the threshold of life and death, Leonilson returned to the Catholicism of his upbringing and, on the edge of the abyss, to the hope of salvation.
Text originally published in Artforum, vol. 63, no. 4, December 2024
Despite his short life, Leonilson is a central figure in Brazilian contemporary art, particularly among the generation of artists who emerged in the 1980s. His diverse body of work—encompassing paintings, drawings, installations, and textiles—rejected the geometric rigor associated with Brazilian Neo-Concretism, embracing an irreverent and unpretentious exploration of gesture, color, and form. Focusing on works from the last five years of the artist’s life, “Agora e as oportunidades” highlighted the devastating and decisive impact of Leonilson’s HIV diagnosis on both his life and his artistic practice, showing the dramatic change in direction of his final works.
The exhibition devoted one room to each year from 1989 to 1993 while a mezzanine displayed a series of illustrations, films, and documents. During these years, the artist explored themes such as the intensity of homosexual love, loneliness and loss, fictionalization of the self, and the adventure of discovering the vast world. In these last works, the artist courageously reflected on the precariousness of gay life during Brazil’s 1980s political dictatorship and the experience of living with HIV, which not only attacked his body but marked him as an “undesirable” subject in Brazilian society. In a 1991 drawing, Os indesejáveis (The Undesirable Ones), Leonilson addressed the bigotry and hatred promoted by extremist and antidemocratic groups, once again on the rise today, with empty glasses standing in for social minorities under the headings THE UNDESIRABLE ONES and THE POISONOUS ONES: HIV carriers, Roma, Indigenous people, prostitutes, and communists. The work that gave the show its title, Agora e as oportunidades, 1991, likewise featured a column of empty glasses representing marginalized subjects, including Black people, gay men, Jews, people with disabilities, and women.
While Leonilson critically confronted the prevailing political situation, he nevertheless grappled with moments of melancholy and surrender. Two works in the show bore the title Leo não consegue mudar o mundo (Leo Can’t Change the World), with the eponymous phrase inscribed on their surfaces, the first a volcanic 1989 painting with a human heart at center against a bloodred ground and the second a spare, hand-embroidered piece on voile from 1991 with text along the upper and lower hems. One could discern a profound human weariness stemming from emotional saturation in works such as Sob o peso dos meus amores (Under the Weight of My Loves), 1990, a self-portrait in the guise of Atlas, depicting the Greek mythological figure burdened with the weight of the universe on his shoulders. Though formally disparate, the three works feature expansive empty areas, emphasizing Leonilson’s sense of insignificance when facing the immense world that envelops him.
The affective and autobiographical connections between the artist and curator were explicitly acknowledged at certain points in the show. In several works, Leonilson depicted a mathematician, a covert reference to Pedrosa, the catalogue explains (when they first met, Leonilson thought Pedrosa studied mathematics). The documentary film A Paixão de JL (The Passion of JL), 2015, included in the show, features recordings of Leonilson repeatedly saying that “Al,” as he nicknamed Pedrosa, was the love of his life. More generally, the pair’s works shared a poetical core: Before he turned to curating, Pedrosa had a conceptual artistic practice of his own, taking up similar themes of love and rejection, autobiography, and textuality, as in Cartas de amor do exílio (parte II) (Love Letters from Exile [Part II]), 1993–95, for which Pedrosa sent six hundred love letters to different men, and displayed laced with red ribbons the ones returned.
Although Leonilson’s practice has a confessional, diaristic aspect, “Agora e as oportunidades” highlighted the artist’s enduring efforts to fictionalize his own life. This inclination manifests in the poetic grandeur that undergirds his narratives—which was also a way to shield intimate aspects that he found challenging to confront directly. In the unostentatious ink-on-paper drawing Favorite Game, 1990, he depicted a male figure standing between the words TRUTH and FICTION—alluding, as the title suggests, to his desire to play with these categories. In the drawing Under Your Spell, I’m Not on Clear Waters, 1991, Leonilson showed a figure gazing down at the surface of the water, looking at a reflection that could be any number of personas: himself, an alter ego, an antihero, a beloved man. Even the artist’s characteristically earnest penmanship, seen frequently in his work, seems potentially inauthentic when compared with the rapid, disheveled handwriting present in his diaries and personal notes, displayed in a documentary vitrine on the museum’s mezzanine.
The motif of the double, central to gay iconology, recurred throughout the exhibition. Sometimes the bodies were connected by their genitals, as in the hugging couple in an untitled 1989 drawing. Other works depict two figures connected at their torsos by a bridge over a running river, as in the painting Jogos perigosos (Dangerous Games), ca. 1990, accompanied by a text reading ESSES JOGOS PERIGOSOS NÃO SÃO GUERRA NEM ESTÃO NO MAR OU NO ESPAÇO MAS POR DETRÁS DE ÓCULOS E UM PAR DE JEANS (These dangerous games are not war nor are they at sea or in space but behind glasses and a pair of jeans). Sometimes, these doubles did not directly touch, like the two towers on stilts in a drawing from 1989, reflecting the fear of infection and transmission of HIV or the impossibility of a platonic love. A profound and tenuous work from 1992 comprised a nearly blank sheet of paper, with only a small circular stain captioned by the words O PERIGOSO (The Dangerous), from which it took its title, and a small L that stood as his signature. The stain is a drop of his own blood, carrying the deadly virus. The series is composed of six additional drawings depicting the treatment’s narrative universe: the finger-pricking for periodic hemograms, the pills, the hopeful rosary. It was paired in the exhibition with a visceral, rapid drawing from 1992 portraying a tangled venous-access device attached to an arm on the reverse side of a small blood-transfusion form from the Hematology Center of São Paulo.
The last room, devoted to the year of the artist’s death, 1993, presents a sublime central installation with the gravity of his farewell to this world: In Instalação sobre duas figuras (Installation on Two Figures), 1993, Leonilson creates his own celebratory funeral mass. Originally installed in the Morumbi Chapel in São Paulo in 1993, the complete work was never seen by the artist, as it was only fully assembled after his death. The spare, quietly ritualistic piece suggests a conclave of ghostlike bodies: There are two chairs dressed in white button-down shirts (embroidered with the phrases DA FALSA MORAL [Of False Morality] and DO BOM CORAÇÃO [Of Good Heart], respectively); a chair covered in a skirtlike cotton sheath; and a coatrack upon which hangs a cloak of white and orange voile and two white men’s shirts joined at the hem, the cuffs falling to the floor. On the latter, at the position of the heart, Leonilson has embroidered the name LASARO, an allusion to Lazarus, the New Testament figure miraculously resurrected by Christ. The doubled shirt seemed to obliquely invoke the figures in another work: Jesus com rapaz acidentado (Jesus with Injured Boy), 1991, in which a haloed Christ holds up the limp, lifeless body of a wounded double, his arms dangling toward the ground. This final installation is at once a utopian wedding, a feared wake, a validating baptism, and a miraculous rebirth. On the threshold of life and death, Leonilson returned to the Catholicism of his upbringing and, on the edge of the abyss, to the hope of salvation.
Text originally published in Artforum, vol. 63, no. 4, December 2024
Leonilson, Leo não pode mudar o mundo [Leo Can’t Change the World], 1991, thread and unstretched canvas on voile, 140.5 x 141 cm
Leonilson, Leo não consegue mudar o mundo [Leo Can’t Change the World], 1989, acrylic paint and metallic paint on unstretched canvas, 156 x 95 cm
Leonilson, Favorite Game, 1990, permanent ink on paper, 21 x 13.5 cm
Leonilson, Under Your Spell I’m Not on Clear Waters, 1990, permanent ink on paper, 30.5 x 23 cm
Leonilson, untitled [Jesus com rapaz acidentado] [Jesus With Accidented Young Man], 1991, permanent ink and gouache on paper, 31 x 23 cm
Leonilson, El puerto [The Harbor], 1992, thread on striped cotton fabric, nail, copper wire, and acrylic paint on mirror frame, 23 x 16 x 2.5 cm
Leonilson, O grande rio [The Large River], c. 1991, permanent ink on paper, 15 x 22 cm
Leonilson, untitled [Sob o peso dos meus amores] [Under the Weight of My Lovers], 1990, permanent ink, metallic paint, and watercolor on paper, 29 x 21 cm
Leonilson, untitled [Jogos perigosos] [Dangerous Games], c. 1990, acrylic paint on canvas, 50 x 60 cm
Leonilson, Instalação sobre duas figuras [Installation on Two Figures], 1993, embroidery and needlework on cotton fabrics, striped cotton fabrics, cotton shirts, piqué shirts, voile, wire hanger, iron rack, wooden chairs, and metal chairs, 179 x 600 x 1200 cm