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FOR WHO DIDN'T BUY THE TRUTH (1) Lisette Lagnado
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"To him who bought the truth", 1991 Embroidery on voile, 39 x 35 cm Collection Luciana Brito e Fábio Cimino, São Paulo Photo Rômulo Fialdini |
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The discourse of sincerity belongs to the expressive structure of the primitive, or to be more explicit, the rhetoric of the primitive is based on a profession faith. It's extremely important not to mistake sincerity for truth, or vice versa. Being sincere requires credibility, no verification is possible; while the existence of truth depends on proof. Confession is one way of showing sincerity in literature (J.J. Rosseau). The diary is too, when it relates the inner moods of the narrator - stories, the support of a fictional work. Lies? Maybe. True lies that come from the heart. What José Leonilson Bezerra Dias (1957-1993) seeks most of all is to convince us of his sincerity: In order to be believed he will even admit to being a "liar"2. The negation of this act of faith is not lying, but rather falseness, the sworn enemy of sincerity . Leonilson never left off from his characteristic irony, but mixed it together with questions of in contemporary epistolary art. Each work (deliberately undefined as to the limits of the drawing, the painting or the embroidery) was made as an intimate record, a narcissistic plunge, and was dedicated to the object of his desire. The title of one his paintings, The Truths Are Many, was the inspiration for the book and the retrospective I recently organized. There is a logic of ambiguity, very current, which permeates Leonilson's attitude in every way (aesthetic, moral, religious, sexual). In this logic the adoption of a principle doesn't prevent the coexistence of its opposite. Although it may be said that all his work is autobiographical, in an aesthetic vein coming from Louise Bourgeois and Cindy Sherman, to cite two widely known artists, I think that the gesture of Leonilson treats on certain of his own personal questions: the amorous discourse and the figures of romanticism; the allegory of disease and the use of biography to give body to the dematerialization of the work of art. In what does this ambiguity consist? In this artist's vision there is on the one hand the desire to bring about a work that "does not deliver a truth" (he always criticized the categorization of art as "abstract", "figurative", or "conceptual", arguing that there was an overlapping of various kind of language), and, on the other, ambiguity of the female figure. Weaving is, generally, woman's work: even so, in certain indigenous cultures this task requires the involvement of men as much as women. Embroidery is also the skill invented by Penelope to postpone the recognition of Ulisses' death, which would have been definitive the moment she accepted one of her suitors. It was in this context of the postponement of an insuperable threat that Leonilson created an embroidery entitled O Penélope. 3 Profane in matters of choice, Leonilson allowed his embroidery to be influenced by the current fashions. This is seem in the choice of material, in the relation between the colors and the textures, in the lightness of the support which does away with the conventional framework, and in the buttons and semiprecious stones sewn on with copper wire4. By way of fashion the artist puts himself into close relation with modernity, just as described by Baudelaire in his essay The Painter of Modern Life. Without falling into any kind of pejorative connotation, Baudelaire weaves a familiar relation between modernity and fashion. "Modernity", says the poet, "is the transitory, the fleeying, the contingent, one half of art, the other half being the eternal and the immutable". Not that Leonilson embodies what Baudelaire would call a "relative, circumstantial element, which would be, if we like, if we like, either in turn or at one and the same time, fashion, moral, and passion." Every era has "its particular way, its look, its smile, in other words its Gioconda, and the look of this end-of-a-century is in the small and meaningful work El Puerto (1992), consisting of a mirror covered by a piece of one of Leonilson's shirts and some biographical information "Leo, 35, 60, 179" (name, age, weight, and height in centimeters). In it lies all the ambivalence of temporality: the passing, the fragile, i.e., modernity and the tragedy of existence. The mirror speaks of the development of disease and the accompanying disintegration of the personality. The highest possible degree of authenticity is recovered and, in the gesture of hiding the figure, the artist approaches the sublime. This fact makes Leonilson's production unique and not merely "private" anyone interpreting his work must bear this in mind so as not fall into a "psychologizing" tendency when faced with a work that concerns the impulse of Being. In this text on the modern painter Baudelaire goes on to refer to an antagonist pair: the "artist" and the "homme du monde" . His idea of "artist" has a more limited meaning since it is essentially tied to the palette. The latter term is, according to him, more wide-ranging as it makes man a "spiritual citizen of the universe." Although this statement might appear to be a bit pompous, it's totally fitting to Leonilson who, on the last day of our interview affirms to be more of a "person full of curiosity" and a "guy who walks everywhere" than he is an "artist"5. Such curiosity is an unmistakable sign of his work, in the search for a hybrid knowledge6. His sincerity, shown in the works through a series of moral adjectives, aims to get around what is pathetic, admirably made sublime by the use of flowers (named, embroidered, painted or constructed). Leonilson brings to the sphere of expression a subject that is rife with problems and which literature knows by name: the meanders of amorous discourse. With no fear of coming to grips with the emotional sphere, the artist was a chronicler of recorded events just as much in his private realm as in public life - a narrative which is evident in the drawings he did for the column, which was typically "modern", by Barbara Gancia (the newspaper Folha de São Paulo, 1991-1993). Based on a very direct reflection on reality, it was necessary to produce a drawing connected to an arbitrary theme, the lines of which, however, would remain consistent with his personal vocabulary. The question is almost insolent: what to think about the dimension of faith and of belief in a postmodern world? An authentic and sincere artist sounds somewhat démodé in the context of postmodernism. The resource of words, thought it deserves a more thorough examination, provides a wider-ranging meaning of the concept of "primitive" - a "modern primitive" if this were possible. Leonilson leaves a testimony whose greatness is related to the prosaic: the work, done as "prayers", like the symbols of a primitive religion, connects the individual to a higher entity. Another factor relevant to the reading of the "embroideries" must always be borne in mind: Leonilson's attitude finds its closest echo in the embodiment of the design of the Shakers - an exhibition that he was able to see in New York in 19877. Like a Shaker, Leonilson assumes the theological inflection of the discourse of sacrifice: in the embroideries there is plainly seen the search for a harmonious inner life, with essential values, lacking any kind of excess - be it moral or aesthetic. It is clear that although some of his phrases may appear "primitive", his readers should not fall for his skillful ingenuousness: Leonilson, in has role as artist, knew very well what he was doing and also knew the critical clashings presented in his work - everything form the formal discussion of the materials to the fine line separating irony form the sublime in modernity. His legacy is valuable in that it reveals the notion of subjectivity after the conceptual experiences. The urgency of the so-called '80s generation, the once so happy and carefree movement, has become a tragic burden in which urgency is now synonymous with death: very upset for not being able to chance the world, Leo infers now that "you can't change the world because the gods do not allow anyone to compete with them". Laymert Garcia dos Santos talks about the "melding of the heart of Jesus with the heart of the lover"8. There is, effectively, a progression in the use of Catholic symbolism which culminates in a plasma of the image of the artist with the image of the divine. As of the ruin wrought by "his" disease, Leonilson delivers an effigy of interiorness: this will be his meaning of truth. Far
from emitting skeptical reflections on the function of the artwork
itself in art, the work of Leonilson is positioned within the plan
of modernity by its questioning of the destiny of the subject, more
precisely the recognition in the awareness of a time which is grasped
in its passing. His attitude implies a cultural activism that points
to an ethical dimension of the "use of pleasures" at this
end-of-a-century, questioning the paradigms of knowledge and of
reason. The self-analytic discourse is developed around the paradoxical
axis if inner truth and of outer truth, at the threshold of a martyrology
(having the image of Saint Sebastião as its emblem). It is
religious rhetoric placed at the service of Passion. The Truths
Are Many is an invitation to the exercise of tolerance: it'e just
as much about an intellectual tolerance, in times of religious and
dogmatic discourses, as it is about the affirmation of a polysemous
desire, originally with various meanings and which is threatened
with disintegration.
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1. This title is inspired by an embroidery of Leronilson's bearing the inscription "For who bought the truth". This article was written in the succession of an earlier long essay (published in: Leonilson: The Truths Are Many, SãoPaulo, Projeto Leonilson and Sesi, 1995) - which makes it more difficult to achieve a fresh view, especially as the intervening time is so short. I have tried, though, to elucidate some questions here which were already in the book and whose insufficiencies perturbed me during my fearful rereadings. The present reflection owes very much to Paul de Man's texts about Rousseau (In: Allegories of Reading, Yale University Press, 1979). 2.
In the name of sincerity, Leonilson also declares to be a traitor,
shy, selfish… 4. In the 1985 edition of the São Paulo Bienal International of Art, the artists Leda Catunda presented a fantastic embroidery entitled Cachoeira, which must have haunted Leonilson's imagination. 5. A quick glance at Leonilson's palette is enough to see that he is not a colorist in the traditional sense of the term. 6. The Truths Are many presents authority symbols (mantle, scepter and crown) immersed in seemingly disconnected references: Agnès Martin, Balenciaga, Bardot, Basquiat, Beats, Berçot, Beys, Bossa Nova, Boy George, Brando, Butô, Chanel, Clemente, Deneuve, Dewaere, duane Michaels, Eva Hess, Hippies, Kelly, Koons, Michael Clark, Miou Miou, New Order, Pollock, Prince, Serra, Stella, Support Surface, Swing, Twiggy, Twombly, Warhol, W. de Maria, Yamamoto, Pantanal, Dias, Carnaval… 7. The Shaker movement originated in Manchester, England, and was started in the United States in 1774 by Ann Lee. It preached a community-based life of a new order of beings, more like angels then men, where there would be no violence, war or ambition. 8. An idea developed by the author in his presentation Between Words and Things (First Impression) in the Museum Lasar Segall (São Paulo, 5 December, 1995).
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