Leonilson’s great exhibition at Iberê Camargo Foundation

One of the exponents of the Brazilian contemporary art, the cearense José Leonilson, will have a retrospective to the height of his talent at the Iberê Camargo Foundation in Porto Alegre. Between March 15 and June 3, 2012, the museum presents the exhibition “Sob o Peso dos Meus Amores” (Under the Heavy Weight of My Loves), conceived by Itaú Cultural in the first semester of 2011, in São Paulo.
Although the curatorial guidelines remain the same, almost a third of the works that will be exhibited in Porto Alegre were absent in the original assembly. This is the first exhibition of Leonilson with this size in the state capital, which for over three decades has not received an individual show of the artist.
In this new edition, the exhibition shows a set of illustrations done between 1991 and 1993 for the column of the journalist Barbara Gancia in the newspaper Folha de São Paulo. "There are one hundred drawings that comment on the everyday life of the city of São Paulo, of the country and of the world in an ironic way and with humor," says the co-curator Ricardo Resende who is also a consultant of the Leonilson Project and the general director of the Centro Cultural São Paulo. An important part of the work of Leonilson, these works oppose the absence of an installation in the chapel of Morumbi, reassembled in its original site in São Paulo, and other works that have been replaced in this second version of “Sob o Peso dos Meus Amores”.
In his brief 36 years of life, Leonilson produced a large collection of works that is now distributed in the greatest public and private collections in the world. Curated by Resende and of the critic of art Bitu Cassundé, a clipping of 365 works represents all phases of the artist. This panoramic view starts from the early studies, dating from 1972 and extends until 1993, the year of his death. It is possible to witness the transformation of a painting with a violent nature into a work more restrained, delicate and intimate expressed in small drawings, sculptures and embroidery. In his last two years, with the work already recognized, Leonilson lived with AIDS and thematized the disease in moments like the seven drawings from the series “O Perigoso” (Dangerous) (1992). Diaries and notebooks of the artist enter into the exhibition space as complements, revealing reflection exercises in the conception of many important works.
The exhibition is organized chronologically in a not too rigid fashion on two floors of the Foundation, and in the lobby that will welcome visitors with works by artists with whom Leonilson hung out: Leda Catunda, Sérgio Romagnolo, Daniel Senise, Luiz Zerbini and Albert Hien. "We evidenced the great works of these artists in the Brazilian art movement of revival of the painting that became known as 80's Generation", as contextualizes Bitu Cassendé. Some of them, more than friends are also partners like Hien, with whom Leonilson shares the authorship of the installation "How to rebuild at least one eighth part of the world", of 1986. A mixture of utopia and irony, this work was created shortly after the nuclear accident at Chernobyl and preceding the painting "Leo não consegue mudar o mundo" (Leo cannot change the world), of 1989. In this, a lifeless brown predominates on the canvas that shows a red heart from which come, like veins, the words Abyss, Lights, Lonely and Dissatisfied.
Producing in a confessional line, Leonilson composed a work that can be read as a diary. He was mainly a romantic. The search for the other, the desire, and the loneliness as a result, emerge in his work.
Family, friends and religion are also frequent subjects. For Cassundé, this is one of the strong points of the artist: "It is from the personal experiences that the artist, through his poetry, raises particular issues and develops them into universal themes, of easy identification and encounter with the other. Leonilson captures the viewer precisely by making him the accomplice of his questionings." In addition, he used to utilize the first person to vent feelings and emotions. An example is the embroidery Voila mon coeur [Here is my heart], inspired by the biblical passage in which Jesus Christ offers his heart to St. John the Baptist. Another emblematic project is the watercolor "Under the heavy weight of my loves," which gives its name to the exhibition.
By mixing techniques of drawing, watercolor, gouache and acrylic with fabrics and embroidery, the works of Leonilson present a unique craftsmanship, differentiating him from other artists of that time. The use of the word is also remarkable in his aesthetics. Early on, the artist explored it as graphic element, sometimes inserted in the work and sometimes in the very titles that call attention for the lyricism. In his texts, phrases or individual words, flows a form of literature that narrates small situations, real or invented.
The love for travelling led him to integrate maps and elements of nature to his poetics. Leonilson related the geography to the body, confusing cities, rivers and trails with arteries and organs. He also kept records of his journeys in a kind of cataloging of everyday life and collected toys, crafts and various objects that later surfaced in his work as signs (volcano, hourglass, plane, ship, bridge, chair, compass, radar etc.). As if he were building a large file, he organized the world in his own way. This obsession led him to construct a work connected with the idea of classification in which appear numbers, lists of names of persons, feelings, states of mind and things.
Today, the institution that organizes and watches over the work of the artist is the Project Leonilson, with over 3,500 cataloged items. The institution has an essential role in the realization of an exhibition of the size of the one we see at the Iberê Camargo Foundation.

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Leonilson - Sob o Peso dos Meus Amores
March 15th to June 3rd
Fundação Iberê Camargo (Av. Padre Cacique, 2.000. Porto Alegre)
www.iberecamargo.org.br