{"id":120481,"date":"2018-01-19T11:00:36","date_gmt":"2018-01-19T16:00:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=120481"},"modified":"2018-01-19T14:59:24","modified_gmt":"2018-01-19T19:59:24","slug":"falling-love-empty-man-work-jose-leonilson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/01\/19\/falling-love-empty-man-work-jose-leonilson\/","title":{"rendered":"Falling in Love with an Empty Man: The Work of Jos\u00e9 Leonilson"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

In general, I\u00a0do not want to meet the artists I fall in love with. I\u2019m keen to preserve the relationship between the art and myself. But that changed when I saw Jos\u00e9 Leonilson\u2019s work in person for the first time, in the exhibition \u201cEmpty Man\u201d\u00a0at the Americas Society in New York.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

In Brazil, Leonilson is considered one of the most important artists of his generation. Born in the northeastern city of Fortaleza, he came of age in the 1980s, in the years immediately following Brazil\u2019s twenty-year dictatorship. Emerging from oppressive times, he and his peers embraced the pleasures of painting, and they made bright and figurative work. But Leonilson\u2019s art was also uniquely personal and literary; words float alone or in poetic arrangements (\u201chere comes your man \/ full of numbers and words\u201d). His presence looms over almost everything he left behind.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

<\/a>

Jos\u00e9 Leonilson,\u00a0Mirro<\/em>, c. 1975. Photo: Edouard Fraipont<\/p><\/div>\n

Leonilson died in 1993, at the age of thirty-six, of AIDS<\/small>. He had learned of his illness only two years prior. As his health rapidly deteriorated, he shifted from painting to making small embroideries on pockets, bags, and bits of canvas. The Americas Society exhibition begins with these later, quietly beautiful works, and is framed around a quote by T. S. Eliot: \u201cIn my\u00a0beginning is my end\u00a0…\u00a0In my end is my beginning.\u201d An early 1975 self-portrait, made from denim jeans and with buttons for eyes, presages the introspective works Leonilson made in the last years of his life.<\/p>\n

<\/a>

Jos\u00e9 Leonilson,\u00a0As ruas da cidade<\/em>, 1988. Photo: Rubens Chiri<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t make impersonal things,\u201d he once said. He liked to paint the body: the brain, the lungs, and the heart. One painting from 1988 delineates human organs, with words flowing through and around them, including the phrase \u201cthe streets of the city.\u201d The names of cities he visited\u2014Madrid, Basel, Bordeaux\u2014often appear in his art; but he was more a wanderer than a traveler.<\/p>\n

\u201cI am searching for something,\u201d he said, \u201cbut I don\u2019t know what I\u2019m looking for.\u201d Leonilson recorded these thoughts in his audio diaries, which he kept on tape cassettes from 1990 until his death three years later. He talks about the time he watched the Wim Wenders film Paris, Texas<\/em>, and how lost the main character appears as he aimlessly walks the desert. Leonilson breaks down into tears, recognizing himself.<\/p>\n

His audiotapes weren\u2019t discovered until after he died. In 2015, Carlos Nader, a friend of Leonilson\u2019s, made them into a film titled The Passion of JL<\/em>. The incredibly moving project, which screened this Thursday at the New School in New York, is narrated solely by Leonilson\u2019s voice, while images of his art flash on the screen. The tapes reveal someone full of feeling and desperately in search of love. \u201cWhy am I so alone? Why don\u2019t I have a boyfriend?\u201d he asks. \u201cI am needy.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Jos\u00e9 Leonilson,\u00a0Jogos Perigosos (Dangerous Games),<\/em>\u00a01990 [photo: Rubens Chiri]<\/p><\/div>The Passion of JL<\/em> takes a troubling turn when Leonilson discovers he is HIV positive. \u201cI feel empty \u2026 with no direction\u2014I simply do not know what to do,\u201d he softly says. He felt paralyzed; his Catholic family, and even some of his closest friends, did not know he was gay. His loneliness intensified as he realized no one he loved could tend to his wounds when he bled. \u201cNow my works are all that I really have,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Leonilson\u2019s friends remember him as warm and gregarious. Many people, including Carlos Nader, have said the voice of the audiotapes is not the one they knew, but one that, in retrospect, illuminates his art.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

I went to the Americas Society exhibition after I saw The Passion of JL<\/em>. As I walked through the galleries, I heard the disembodied voice of Leonilson\u2019s tapes (\u201clove is the best thing there is\u201d; \u201cI think I will live long\u201d; \u201cI\u2019m not afraid of dying, but of suffering\u201d). I imagined his wounds as I counted the thirty-four tallies that look like stitches in the piece 34\u00a0with scars<\/em>. I wondered if he had cheated or been the one betrayed as I read the word \u201ctraitor,\u201d sewn above a sea of crystals. I figured he had cobbled these works together in utter silence, and likely alone.<\/p>\n

<\/a>

Jos\u00e9 Leonilson,\u00a0Traidor (traitor),<\/em> 1991.\u00a0Photo: Edouard Fraipont<\/p><\/div>\n

In 1991, the year Leonilson was diagnosed with HIV, he made the work Empty Man<\/em>. He used a found piece of linen depicting the children\u2019s tale of the tortoise and the hare racing in a field. Beneath the scene, he stitched the words \u201csalt. blood. salive,\u201d and below that, a man\u2019s torso surrounded by the broken-up phrase, \u201cempty man \/ lone \/ ready.\u201d Echoes of this empty, lone man appear elsewhere: the name Jos\u00e9 stitched in the corner of a faded green rectangle, a single figure labeled as an \u201cisland,\u201d and most poetically, the word nobody<\/em>, sewn on the edge of a pink pillow.<\/p>\n

<\/a>

Jos\u00e9 Leonilson,\u00a0 Ningu\u00e9m (Nobody),<\/em> 1992. Photo: Edouard Fraipont<\/p><\/div>\n

The curators of \u201cEmpty Man,\u201d Cecilia Brunson, Gabriela Rangel, and Susanna V. Temkin, have spoken about how Leonilson\u2019s death has given rise to a kind of myth around his works. We feel them to be sincere, autobiographical expressions\u2014we are convinced he is speaking directly and openly to us. But Brunson points out these works must be read as partly fictional. She cites the Brazilian critic Adriano Pedrosa, who compared Leonilson\u2019s art to the mind games outlined in A Lover\u2019s Discourse <\/em>by Roland Barthes. \u201cIt pierces you so deeply, the language, that you think you\u2019re going straight to the person\u2019s soul,\u201d she said. \u201cBut it\u2019s really constructed as language.\u201d<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

\u201cHe was the lightest, most agreeable person, in high spirits … At the same time, he was introspective, spending hours and hours drawing and doodling, and writing in his diaries,\u201d Ricardo Bezerra told me over email. The Bezerras were close friends of Leonilson\u2019s and had him over to their house in Fortaleza regularly, where he would doodle in what the family called the \u201cbig book.\u201d After Leonilson died, the Bezerras took the pages out from the book and hung them on their living room walls.<\/p>\n

Bezerra told me Leonilson was always bringing their family presents. He was full of \u201csolidarity,\u201d and his soul was \u201clight, so light.\u201d \u201cHe was very open,\u201d Bezerra wrote, \u201csufficiently talkative, but not redundant, very well humored, and always wore a delicious smile.\u201d<\/p>\n

The more I learned about Leonilson and looked at his art, the more I felt a sense of loss. I missed him. His absence haunted me. And, like any object of love, it did not matter if his actual person was faithful to my image of him.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Jos\u00e9 Leonilson, O que posso fazer dentro de mim (What Can I Do Inside Myself)<\/em>, 1991. Photo: Rubens Chiri<\/p><\/div>\n

The last work in \u201cEmpty Man\u201d is a painting from 1991:\u00a0What Can I Do Inside Myself<\/em>. It depicts colorful, organ-like forms, and again there are words nestled around them: \u201cgolden interior\u201d; \u201cwhat there is of you in me\u201d; \u201cjewels.\u201d \u201cInside\u201d him, we find the precious stones, scraps of fabric, buttons, and fragmented words of his art. Leonilson once said, \u201cI make things for those I love.\u201d Looking at his portraits is like seeing them through the eyes of a lover: while they may be beautifully unreal, the emotions we feel are no less true.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u201cJos\u00e9 Leonilson: Empty Man<\/a>\u201d is on view at the Americas Society through February 3, 2018.<\/p>\n

Elisa Wouk Almino<\/a>\u00a0is a writer and translator from Portuguese. She is currently the associate editor at Hyperallergic.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  In general, I\u00a0do not want to meet the artists I fall in love with. I\u2019m keen to preserve the relationship between the art and myself. But that changed when I saw Jos\u00e9 Leonilson\u2019s work in person for the first time, in the exhibition \u201cEmpty Man\u201d\u00a0at the Americas Society in New York. In Brazil, Leonilson […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1367,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[3784,32596,32590,32594,32591,32593,32592,32597,32595,2474],"class_list":["post-120481","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-aids","tag-carlos-nader","tag-cecilia-brunson","tag-fortaleza","tag-gabriela-rangel","tag-ricardo-bezerra","tag-susanna-v-temkin","tag-the-americas-society","tag-the-passion-of-jl","tag-wim-wenders"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nFalling in Love with an Empty Man: The Work of Jos\u00e9 Leonilson<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"In Brazil, Jos\u00e9 Leonilson, who died of AIDS at thirty-six, is considered one of the most important artists of his generation.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/01\/19\/falling-love-empty-man-work-jose-leonilson\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Falling in Love with an Empty Man: The Work of Jos\u00e9 Leonilson by Elisa Wouk Almino\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"January 19, 2018 \u2013   In general, I\u00a0do not want to meet the artists I fall in love with. 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