[open the box] Leonilson

Hardly anyone remembers now, but in 1984 there was a huge return-to-painting movement in Brazil, after an important change in European art. In Italy the movement became known as the Transvanguardia, an expression coined by the critic Achille Bonito Oliva in a book (La transvanguardia italiana) published in 1980, and in Germany the new expression of the Junge Wilde artists revived an ironic epic of romanticism. A group of artists in Brazil was systematically identified with the Transvanguardia (being referred to as such in the press), producing an expressionist and heroic painting, in a return-to-painting that broke with the influence of the generation of artists born out of the Brazilian neoconcretism of the fifties.

One of these artists was Leonilson, and this is one of the significant works from the period which once again linked the art of Brazil to European art.

In this phase Leonilson would transform his work into a very delicate process in which drawing (on paper and on embroideries) would assume a very peculiar delicateness, an almost visual poetry via drawing. The epic dimension would be transformed into a lyrical expression, with the bodies morphing into small allegories in which the use of the word stresses the poetic which floats in them.

His premature death interrupted this path towards a melancholy intimacy, but his poetics would leave a mark in the context of the generation of artists that began to stand out in the early eighties.

Biography
Leonilson was born in Fortaleza (Brazil) in 1953, and moved as a child to São Paulo, the city where at the age of twenty he started a degree in Visual Arts at the Fundação Armando Alvares Penteado. He exhibited for the first time in 1979 in a group show at the Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo, with his first solo exhibition being in 1984, after which he began to show his works in several American and European institutions, with particular note being the exhibitions Panorama da arte brasileira, Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo (1980 and 1989), Moving mountains, Kunstforum (Munich, 1987), Modernidade, Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris (1987) and Oliver Herring and José Leonilson, Museum of Modern Art (New York, 1996). He was also an illustrator, working on the newspaper Folha de S. Paulo between 1991 and 1993. He participated in the São Paulo Biennial (1985). In 1990 he received the Brasilia Prize for Visual Arts, and in 1994 (posthumously) the Associação Paulista de Críticos de Arte Prize. He died in São Paulo in 1993. He is represented in several different private and institutional collections, with special note being: the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, the Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo Modern art museums, the Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris) and the Tate Collection (London).

Bibliography
Lagnado, Lisette, Leonilson: são tantas as verdades, São Paulo, Projeto Leonilson/Serviço Social da Indústria, 1995.
Mesquita, Ivo, “Introdução”, in Leonilson: use, é lindo, eu garanto, São Paulo, Projeto Leonilson/ Cosac Naify, 1997.