José Leonilson Bezerra Dias (Fortaleza, CE, 1957 - São Paulo, SP, 1993). Painter, draughtsman, sculptor. In 1961, moved with his family to São Paulo. Between 1977 and 1980, attended Fundação Armando Álvares Penteado (Faap), where he studied with professors Julio Plaza (1938-2003) and Nelson Leirner (1932). He took watercolor classes with Dudi Maia Rosa (1946) at the Aster school of arts, which he attended from 1978 to 1981. In the latter year, in Madrid, he held his first solo show at Casa do Brasil and traveled to other European cities. In Milan he met Antonio Dias (1944), who introduced him to the Italian transvanguard art critic Achille Bonito Oliva (1939).
He returned to Brazil in 1982. Leonilson's work is predominantly autobiographical and is concentrated in the last ten years of his life. According to critic Lisette Lagnado, each piece made by the artist is constructed like a letter to an intimate diary. In 1989 he began to use sewing and embroidery, which became recurrent in his production.
In 1991, he discovered he lived with HIV, and the fact had a dominant impact on his work. His last work, an installation conceived for the Morumbi Chapel in São Paulo in 1993, has a spiritual meaning and alludes to the fragility of life. For this exhibition and for another solo show held the same year, he received, in 1994, a posthumous tribute and an award from Associação Paulista de Críticos de Arte (APCA). In the same year of his death, family and friends founded the Leonilson Project, with the objective of organizing the artist's archives and researching, cataloging, and disseminating his work.
LEONILSON . In: ENCICLOPÉDIA Itaú Cultural de Arte e Cultura Brasileiras. São Paulo: Itaú Cultural, 2021. Available at: <http://enciclopedia.itaucultural.org.br/pessoa8742/leonilson>. Accessed on: 25 Jun. 2021. Encyclopedia entry. ISBN: 978-85-7979-060-7