José Leonilson: Leonilson – Drawn: 1975–1993

Malmö Konsthall, June 19 – October 10 2021

Frida Sandström

The pandemic of the last two years has not only raised public awareness regarding the global distribution of health measurements and the means for social reproduction, it has also brought attention to the unresolved and ongoing HIV/AIDS disease. During the last thirty years, and amid the waves of an ongoing pandemic, discussions about the handling of HIV/AIDS have recurred. Given how research on vaccination and treatment of COVID-19 is both ongoing and extensive, the question remains that if COVID-19 vaccines can be developed in a year, why is there still no HIV vaccine? As it seems, lessons from the development of the COVID-19 vaccine are now being harnessed in research regarding an HIV vaccine,1 yet it remains unclear whether the disease will remain stigmatised and consequently left unprioritised, or if global attention to its risk groups will change. At the University of Copenhagen, gender scholars Michael Nebeling and Mons Bissenbakker have begun research in a newly initiated project, “The cultural history of AIDS in Denmark,” covering the years 1981–2021. One of its purposes is to fill the gap in knowledge regarding the continual discursive presence of the disease, in art and popular culture, as well as in social life and public administration.2

At Kunsthal Overgaden in Copenhagen, the group exhibition, Psychopathia Sexualis, reflects Danish public health education about HIV prevention, and the cultural expressions that arose therefrom, during the nineteen eighties and after. In the tv advertisements of the 1980s and 90s, targeting young people to practice safe sex, we find a mirroring of today’s discussions regarding teenagers’ and kids’ role in COVID-19 prevention. Besides these archival resources, including material from the still existing gay community “Bøssehuset,” which unfortunately is historically romantisised as an exhibition object, Carlos Motta’s performance for video Legacy, 2019, expresses the exhaustive endurance not only of his artistic execution of the work, but of the history of HIV/AIDS. Wearing a dental gag, Motta’s talking head stares directly into the camera while listing the history of the illness, from 1908 to 2019, his dripping saliva draining most articulations while bringing attention to the continuous renunciation of bodily fluids in public space and personal relations.

José Leonilson, Installation view of Leonilson – Drawn: 1975–1993, Malmö Konsthall 2021. Photo: Helene Toresdotter — **José Leonilson, Installation view of *Leonilson – Drawn: 1975–1993,* Malmö Konsthall 2021. Photo: Helene Toresdotter**

In Danish artist Niels Nedergaard’s Movement studies and Untitled, both dating from 1975, photographs, which were initially taken by the artist as sketches for paintings, give body to the glitching relations implied by the withdrawal of the sick from the social sphere. These images give the sense of the destabilization of bodily contours; Nedergaard’s multi-exposed photos of a standing body thus function like a visual score for social absence, obscured contacts, and enforced obliteration. Yet, the manifold layers of this body also imply an insistence to multiply and relate, as in Steve Paxon’s 1977 Small Dance, in which the American choreographer insisted that the still standing body be in continuous activity, barely perceptible to sight. Nedergaard passed away with AIDS in 1987, at the age of 43.

This absent presence of social bodies is also in focus at Malmö konsthall, where the fading visuals of Brazilian artist José Leonilson form the retrospective “Leonilson – Drawn: 1975–1993.” Initially curated for KW Berlin [by Krist Gruijthuijsen], the selection of works hangs like an assembly of alienated figures in Klas Anshelm’s sterile gallery architecture. Leonilson’s early oeuvre reflects a vivid interest in fashion, voguing and drag, materialised both in drawing and montage, such as the fanzine Vogue Ideal, 1976. In a few pages from the home-made journal, naïve characters are drawn in spectacular clothing, one on each page with a fact box incorporated, for both name and profession, such as “pederastia” and “balconista”. What is hinted at is the exclusion of gay and trans bodies in fashion and commercial print. Throughout the 1970s and 80s, these fledgling works are transformed from clothing and accessories to more abstract and organic shapes. At the same time, Leonilson’s use of paper and fabric changes from a means for communal identification to layers of social dispossession.

José Leonilson Installation view Leonilson – Drawn: 1975–1993, Malmö Konsthall 2021. Photo: Helene Toresdotter — **José Leonilson Installation view *Leonilson – Drawn: 1975–1993,* Malmö Konsthall 2021. Photo: Helene Toresdotter**

Besides minor bodies and organs – e.g. hearts, lungs – floating in monochrome landscapes, the shape of a banner is introduced, a form that remains during the years leading up to the artist’s death in 1993. While clothing and objects are drawn, painted, or assembled in montage or sculptures, banners, sometimes figuring like stairways, are produced from fabric and cardboard. Many are perforated or full of numbers, counting either days or people dying, such as in Yellow with Numbers, 1987. Leonilson’s abstract and mathematical decomposition of the material echoes Lee Lozano’s perforation of her almost scientifically figured abstract paintings in 1970. This was the year that Lozano initiated her Drop Out performance, ending with her death in 1999. In November 1970, she noted the following words on a drawing: “The painting trip gets weaker & weaker, more & and more forced and distasteful.”3

Lozano’s refusal to adopt an artist’s identity, or to identify with a particular gender and political subjectivity was manifested by way of disappearing both socially and geographically. Leonilson’s works reflect no objection, but an involuntary lonesome artist, whose social exclusion as a gay person in Brazil was further heightened by the impact of HIV/AIDS within the community. On an A4 aquarelle paper, three lit lamps figure against a green background forming a small square, against the otherwise naked fabric. Each lamp is accompanied with the index word “lamp,” and at the bottom of the green area, the words “Leo can’t change the world” form a contour line against the rest of the unpainted paper. The work with the same title dates to 1989 and is one among many minor drawings and paintings by the artist, reflecting his inability to change, not only the world, but also the social future he shares with his community, a community from which he is forced to keep social distance, in order to survive.

The absence of human touch sounds loudly in the spacious exhibition space, and in the documentary With the whole ocean to swim, by Karen Harley from 1997. The voice of the artist expresses the lack of someone with whom to dedicate his work, on top of a decreasing interest in individual art touring (a matter that is also made clear in the artist’s written correspondence with curators and collectors, which are formulated as if addressing a friend or a lover). Leonilson here appears as the combination of two lonesome characters: the alienated artist and the repressed gay person, both of whom are forced to perform in order to exist, a labour for which he seems to lose both faith and power. In the minor drawing Favorite Game, 1990, a colour- and faceless character is drawn in one line-contour, the body shape fitting like a dash between the words “fact” and “fiction” that are written in a text box behind the character’s knees. Taken together, the two appearances of the character, alongside the words, form an upside-down cross. Also, in Gifts to you, 1990, two characters with similarly faceless shapes lay upon each other as if either making out or falling from high above, or both. The figures are contained in a monochrome square, around which the work title and the words “Things to remember” and Things to forget” form the shape of it, separating the two bodies from the rest of white, the blank page – here inseparable from the rest of the gallery space.

José Leonilson El Puerto (The harbour), ca. 1992 Photo: Edouard Fraipont — **José Leonilson *El Puerto (The harbour),* ca. 1992 Photo: Edouard Fraipont**

During the last years of Leonilson’s life and activity, his brief of comments or calls for help and company are transposed from paper to fabric, where the artist has embraided words and figures whose alienation from the two-dimensional surface seems to exaggerate. If in Where can I find one bay to rest my head?, ca. 1990, the question appears in the middle of an uncolored silk piece, below the picture of a hand whose fingers are indexing the cities of New York, Amsterdam and Rio, a large, unstretched canvas hang empty like an undressed skin, with lines of words filling its margin: “Leo can’t change the world / because the gods won’t accept any / competition with them / the boys / poetry.” In this piece from 1991, nobody, no character, is drawn in contours, and only words shape the sign of disappearance. In the same year, Leonilson was himself diagnosed with AIDS, and could only work with a needle and thread. In Penelope, 1993, produced shortly before the artist had passed away, the banner shape returned. This time it was without holes or numbers, leaving the patched pieces of voile hanging like a torn body or dress. No one was there to carry, or to wear it.

Frida Sandström is a writer, critic, and a contributing editor at Paletten Art Journal (SE). She is a PhD fellow in Modern Culture at the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies at the University of Copenhagen (DK), where she is currently working on her PhD thesis, “Art criticism as social critique.”

1 https://www.hiv.gov/blog/hiv-covid-19-potential-new-hiv-prevention-tools-and-more-research-highlights-croi-2021-video

2 https://nors.ku.dk/english/research/centre-for-gender-studies/chad/

3 Iris Müller-Westermann, ed. Lee Lozano. Moderna Museet, 2010, 38.