LEONILSON; PEDROSA, Adriano (ed.)
Leonilson. Now and Opportunities

Leonilson (José Leonilson Bezerra Dias, Fortaleza, Brazil, 1957—1993, São Paulo, Brazil) is a central figure in Latin American art and a key reference in the broader context of artists addressing queer themes. Although often associated with the Brazilian Geração 80 [80s Generation], his most singular and mature work was produced in the last five years of his life, between 1989 and 1993, the subject of this book—he died from AIDS related causes at the age of 36. During that brief period, Leonilson developed a highly personal language, often incorporating text in a poetic and diaristic manner into his drawings, paintings, installations, and embroideries.

His works intensely express his passions and emotions, exploring themes of love, abandonment, loss, loneliness, and illness. However, he also reflects about his feelings on politics, as seen in the painting that gives this book its title: Agora e as oportunidades, or Now and Opportunities, along with other works from series devoted to different minorities and several illustrations made for the Barbara Gancia newspaper column from 1991 to 1993.

This publication is the largest monograph on Leonilson to date, accompanying a major exhibition dedicated to him at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand in 2024. It focused on the so-called late Leonilson, the artist’s mature phase in which he refined his language and his poetics, using increasingly fewer elements in his compositions—often with religious features—and reaching a truly sublime culmination in Instalação sobre duas figuras [Installation on Two Figures] from 1993. Despite the diaristic nature of his work, it is crucial to understand the artist’s oeuvre not from a biographical approach—since he often combines truth and fiction, biography and fabulation—but rather through his monumental poetic construction, represented in images, materials, and texts.

More than three decades after his death, the artist keeps offering us new opportunities for reading, inspiration, and signification. Leonilson’s persistent image, through artworks, exhibitions, books, films, theater, and tattoos, is that of a vibrant, multiple, and contradictory anti-hero. There is a bit of him in many of us.

[publishers’ note]

Text by Carlos Eduardo Riccioppo, Irene V. Small, Julia Bryan-Wilson, Miguel Lopez, Pablo Lafuente, Teo Teotonio.

Published by Museu de Arte de São Paulo, 2025
Monographs