The first major European retrospective of José Leonilson’s work has landed in Portugal. The exhibition is an intimate portrait of the Brazilian artist’s life, from the 80s generation, and is on show until September 18 at the Serralves Museum. Pure and harsh criticism is visible in Leonilson’s delicate work, which, through aphorisms, shows current values, transforming the artist into a contemporary icon.

From the Brazilain Northeast, immigrant, homosexual and HIV-positive, Leonilson dedicated his work to minorities. In the first room, we see pieces made between the 70s and 80s, the chapter of a brief but intensely lived career. In the drawings we find a “gypsy whore”, a “taxi girl masseuse”, a “clerk” and a “strip-girl”, part of a community that the artist describes as “unwanted and poisonous”, into which he integrated alongside Indians, gypsies and communists. In the same room we see a varied collection, which includes drawings and paintings, sculptures inspired by German architectural lines, and even the personal correspondence between Leonilson and other artists, such as Albert Hien. Herói humilhado (1988) and the drawings of Atlas and Sisyphus represent the weight of the world and the hardness of a stone in contrast to the body’s fragility. “I can’t do easy work if my life is hard”, says the artist in a documentary feature in the exhibition.

The son of an embroiderer and a fabric merchant, Leonilson followed in his parents’ footsteps, in the next room dedicated to his textile work. Embroidered on canvas, we read Leo não pode mudar o mundo (1991), “because the gods do not allow any competition with them”. This account expresses the artist’s powerlessness before the ruthless reality and the HIV infection, which he was diagnosed that year, when it was a death sentence. But Leonilson did not give up art. He compulsively continued to cross mountains, deserts and oceans. The series of drawings O Perigoso (1992) was drawn up after the artist was hospitalised, the first figure containing a drop of blood branding the risk of contagion from a disease once pejoratively associated with the gay community.

The marble room contains a selection of drawings between 1991 and 1993 (the year of his death), which are said to have been published in the Brazilian newspaper Folha de São Paulo. The motifs are based on the lower-class Northeastern imaginary, where the use of objects and symbolic expressions of Brazilian culture is commonplace. Between sand castles and seas of roses, between the poetic and the political, the artist denounces the lack of food, sanitation, hospitals, schools and shame as we can see in: Administração doméstica lava roupa suja (sic) (1991) or Inverno em São Paulo pronuncia-se inferno (1992). A white cube in the centre of the room houses the Instalação sobre duas figuras (1993), dedicated to the Chapel of Morumbi in São Paulo. This sums up Leonilson’s religious will throughout his oeuvre. There is nothing more intimate than a chapel’s confessional space to conclude an exhibition that is an open diary of Leonilson’s life. In the middle of the installation, two chairs “Da falsa moral” and “Do bom coração” have the same antithetical presence as the artist’s drawings. On the left “Lázaro” awaits in purgatory the angels’ arrival after a tortured life. This is an allusion to the soul’s immortality, which Leonilson achieved with his work.

The exhibition Leonilson Drawn 1975-1993 is at the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art until September 18, 2022.