José Leonilson Bezerra Dias (Fortaleza, Ceará, 1957 – São Paulo, São Paulo, 1993). Painter, draftsman, sculptor. In 1961, he moved with his family in São Paulo. Between 1977 and 1980, he studied art education at the Fundação Armando Álvares Penteado (FAAP), where he is a student of Julio Plaza and Nelson Leirner. He takes watercolor classes with Dudi Maia Rosa at the Aster art school, which he attended from 1978 to 1981. Leonilson´s work reflects strong personal subjective expression. In his drawings, paintings and delicate embroidery, he works with words and body mappings, which comprise a private yet open diary. Leonilson builds a romantic narrative in search of the sublime, often also alluding to nonconformity linked to feelings of impotence and inability to take action. The formal worn look of this embroidery seems to further intensify the sentimental content, by revealing a certain precariousness of the human condition. Upon discovering he had AIDS virus, the themes of fear, death and disease become pervaded in his work. He began to dwell on the transcendence and fragility of life, delving deeper into the ideas of absence, grief and memory. Addressing intimacy even more deeply, yet conveying universal fears and feelings, his work became more delicate and moving at the end of his life. His latest work, an installation designed for the Capela do Morumbi, in São Paulo, in 1993, has a spiritual meaning and alludes to the fragility of life. For this exhibition and for another individual held in the same year, in 1994 he received a posthumous tribute and an award from the Associação Paulista de Críticos de Artes (APCA). In the same year of his death, family and friends founded the Leonilson Project, with the aim of organizing the artist’s archives and researching, cataloging and publicizing his works.