“Projeto Leonilson Trinta Anos”

Refined poetic writing, delicate colors and lines, fragile embroidery, everyday objects and graphic elements make the work of visual artist Leonilson Bezerra Dias (1957-1993) an extensive autobiographical production, which exposes the dramas and anxieties of contemporary man.

Leonilson moved to São Paulo as a child, studied fine arts at FAAP but did not finish college. In the early 1980s, he was already part of the generation that revolutionized the art world, along with a group led by Leda Catunda and Sérgio Romagnolo. From the 1990s onwards, the artist established himself as an important figure in the history of Brazilian art. Despite his short career of just over a decade, he left an extensive legacy. His various diaries, journals, collections and works are now housed in the Leonilson Project, which is responsible for taking care of this heritage.

The artist participated in important exhibitions in Brazil and abroad, such as: the 1985 São Paulo Biennial, the group exhibitions "New Dimension of the Object" at MAC USP,
"Transvanguarda e Culturas Nacionais", at MAM RJ, "Hien, Leonilson and Ebinger", at Pulitzer Art Gallery, in Amsterdam, "Brazilian Modern Art" at MAM RJ; and the solo exhibitions "Moving Mountains" in Munich, "O pescador de palavras", at Galeria Luisa Strina, "O inconformado" at Galeria Thoman Cohn Arte Contemporânea, in Rio de Janeiro, among others.

In a documentary produced in the 1980s by Ana Maria Magalhães, entitled "spray jet", Leonilson makes the following statement: "Life and art are part of the leap into the abyss that I decided to take". For curator Bitu Cassundé, life and art in Leonilson's work are always interconnected: "A striking element in Leonilson's creations, the word reveals intimacies and shows that the body is the extension of the work and the work is an extension of the body."

In 1991, Leonilson discovered he was infected with the AIDS virus, a fact that had a strong influence on his work, further increasing the production of autobiographical works. The artist died in May 1993 in São Paulo.

The Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo presented the exhibition “Leonilson: Truth, Fiction” at the end of 2014. The exhibition, which was shown at Estação Pinacoteca, was curated by Adriano Pedrosa and brought together more than 150 of the artist’s works, including paintings, drawings, embroidered objects and the installation mounted at Capela do Morumbi in 1993, his last work. In partnership with the Leonilson Project, the Pinacoteca launched, in celebration of the exhibition, a previously unpublished silkscreen print from 1993, with a print run of 100. According to the curator, the name of the exhibition came from the fact that the works presented contained juxtapositions of ideas, such as when the artist mixed autobiographical and fictional content, or when he mixed public news with facts that occurred in his private life.