Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand (MASP) opened an important exhibition on Brazilian artist José Leonilson Bezerra Dias, 1957-1993, titled Leonilson: Now and Opportunities, on August 23, 2024. Curated by Adriano Pedrosa—the artistic director of MASP and curator of this year's Venice Biennale, Foreigners Everywhere—with curatorial assistance from Teo Teotonio, the show is organised chronologically across five rooms on the museum's first floor, each focusing on a single year. The exhibition is on view until November 17, 2024. Its opening week coincided with the third edition of SP-Arte, an art fair in São Paulo, which aimed to bring together hundreds of artists essential both to the history of the country’s art and the global contemporary scene.

Now and Opportunities features a selection of paintings, drawings, embroideries, and installations by Leonilson, spotlighting work from the final five years of his life (1989 -1993), known as 'Late Leonilson' and often considered his most complex and prolific period. The artist, whose work was closely tied to the leading art movements of the late 20^th century, particularly Conceptual art and Neo-expressionism, was born in Fortaleza, Brazil, but moved to São Paulo in 1971, becoming entrenched in the local art scene. With more than 300 works and documents capturing the artist's nuanced political, public, and personal perspectives, the exhibition illustrates how Leonilson infused his art with a blend of intimate, autobiographical elements and broader existential themes around queerness.

Leonilson is an artist who is both central and marginal in the history of Brazilian art. – Adriano Pedrosa, Artistic Director, MASP

In the press release for the exhibition, Pedrosa states, “Leonilson is an artist who is both central and marginal in the history of Brazilian art. Central, because he is the author of an unavoidable body of work at the end of the 20th century, recognised in countless exhibitions, books and even tattoos.” Leonilson was also marginal because he didn’t easily fit into any art movements or generations of Brazilian artists. Most artists in his time were experimenting with abstraction (especially minimalism), installations and performance art, whereas Leonilson’s complex body of work took an activist stance, intertwining significant social and emotional positions.

Works in the exhibition reflect Leonilson's philosophical attitude to his life and the world around him. His practice spanned various mediums, but his drawings and embroideries became particularly iconic. These artworks often incorporated delicate, meticulous line work, minimalist imagery, and a combination of words and symbols. Take, for example, Slave (1990), where simple line drawings of a rust-red boot, a blue, thinly smiling head and a colourless police cap float in the centre of a blank canvas alongside the word “SLAVE”. The composition and simple forms invite comparison with a nursery mobile, or a cartouche, our manifold experiences of power and oppression distilled into and projected out from this dense ideographic form. His use of language—sometimes fragmented, poetic, or deeply personal—infused his works with a confessional and reflective quality. This comes through in depictions of people Leonilson had relationships with, or events he was affected by, engaging with difficult historical and social justice topics like slavery and human rights. For Leonilson, meaning and material enjoyed a certain equivalence, like two kinds of threads, inviting an exploration of their twists and turns. We see them woven together in the same playful manner. In his kitschy, embroidered pink duvet cover Ninguém (Nobody), Leonilson delves into the masculine/feminine dyad, vulnerability, fragility and existential questions around queerness.

Dramatically, the last room addresses the artist’s fear of death, vulnerability and intimacies around love, including the work Lázaro (1993), made up of two cotton shirts joined at the waist and hung from a freestanding clothes rail next to a bright orange textile piece. Hanging like the ghost of an embrace, it stands as an emblem of grief and queer love. Another installation reveals two chairs covered with draped white shirts. The walls are bare, save for one work on paper, drawing a stark comparison with the other rooms, which are packed with small drawings and embroidery works, almost like musical notation. Leonilson: Now and Opportunities is raw, thought-provoking and a great homage to the artist’s short, untimely life with so many intricate details embedded in his chosen body of work.

‘Leonilson: Now and Opportunities’ is on view from August 23 - November 17, 2024 at MASP in São Paulo.