José Leonilson’s Embrace for the Emotionally Exhausted

This piece appears in the columns section of frieze 245, ‘Wordplay’

‘Every person with a body should be given a guide to dying as soon as they are born,’ declares Anne Boyer in her memoir The Undying (2019). This idea appeals to me: envisioning death as something graphically traceable or receiving a ‘toolbox’ to sift through the intricacies of mourning and mortality. Put simply: learning, from life’s outset, how to feel less alone would have been invaluable.

The Brazilian artist José Leonilson was my first art-love. I remember encountering his subtle, disarming work among the visual feast of the now-landmark 24th São Paulo Biennial in 1998. As a shy, proto-queer pre-teen, drawing was my refuge in navigating burgeoning anxiety and connecting with others in a pre-social media world. ‘Can I see what you’re doodling?’ was the question I was always waiting for. Looking at Leonilson’s works, it seemed that he shared this quest with anyone who crossed his path.

The artist’s vulnerable, raw lines, delicately stitched figures and fragmented words have stayed with me to this day. It seemed magical that someone could convey the gravest matters of life and death through the often-devalued idiom of drawing and embroidery. I remember recognizing the poignancy of his Jogos Perigosos (Dangerous Games, 1989): two faceless figures, their chests connected by a bridge over a seemingly insurmountable road, underscored by a few hastily handwritten words which roughly translate from Portuguese as: ‘These dangerous games / Are not war / Are not in the sea or in outer space but behind glasses and a pair of jeans.’

Part of Geração 80 (The ’80s Generation), the first art movement to blossom around the fall of Brazil’s dictatorial regime in 1988, Leonilson had already taken for his primary subject the body in relation to other bodies and its surroundings. However, as his generation soon became the first to grapple with the horrors of the AIDS crisis, and its destruction of countless lives and communities, his own daily experiences of his body’s vitality and, ultimately, tragic deterioration became the raw matter of his work.

Unflinchingly following his gut, Leonilson seemed to speak, draw and write with enviable ease. He filled his works with fragmented bodies, tightrope walkers, erupting volcanos, floating shapes and more-or-less recognizable symbols that indulge in semi-fictional autobiographical impulses long before the recent return to autofiction in literature and the arts. His style is something like a protracted fit of sensibility, a habit of attentiveness and enthusiasm, making him a captivating visual storyteller of his generation without being confined by it.

In 1991, he was diagnosed with HIV; an unstretched canvas painting from the same year, The Game Is Over, seems revealing of his attitude toward the news. The artist – who had once essayed tenderness, seduction and sometimes inappropriate arousal – had to figure out how to stay around as the dangerous one. The seven-drawing series ‘O Perigoso’ (The Dangerous One, 1992), one of which included a drop of Leonilson’s HIV-positive blood, was a bold declaration of his sexual orientation and personal struggle: ‘I am a dangerous person in the world. No one can kiss me. I can’t have sex. If I cut myself, no one can take care of my cuts. Some people are dangerous because they have a weapon in hand. I have something inside me that makes me dangerous,’ he told curator Lisette Lagnado in a 1992 interview.

The works made during his hospitalization seem to capture the liminal space between words and meaning where nuance and ambivalence reside. While bedridden, he drew and embroidered short texts or single words onto pillowcases and light fabrics, and scribbled in scattered notepads. Intimate, confessional and sometimes heart-breaking – in Ninguém (Nobody, 1992), for instance, the titular word appears embroidered on the left-hand corner of a lace pillowcase – his words became sparser as his illness progressed. Delays and pauses come to the fore; words and images are combined like expertly prepared sushi – raw, fresh, placed just so.

Leonilson’s work offers a much-needed embrace for the emotionally exhausted. It highlights the possibility – or even the necessity – of finding solidarity in individual suffering. We experience sickness in our bodies, minds, cells and even in our very words and phonemes – a reflection of the brokenness of the material world we share. Like Leonilson’s recurrent tightrope walkers, we must retain our balance through political and social instability, inhabiting what Boyer refers to as the ‘gorgeous framework of mortality’ – the common ground of vulnerability.

This article first appeared in frieze issue 245 with the headline ‘Tightrope Walker’

_{Main image: Leonilson, Sabiá; Teresadapraia,1993, installation view of ‘Leonilson Drawn 1975–1993’, 2020. Courtesy: Projeto Leonilson; photograph: Frank Sperling}