Cara e Coroa

DELICATE EPICHardly anyone remembers now, but in 1984 there was a huge return-to-painting movement in Brazil, after an important change in European art. In Italy the movement became known as the Transvanguardia, an expression coined by the critic Achille Bonito Oliva in a book (La transvanguardia italiana) published in 1980, and in Germany the new expression of the Junge Wilde artists revived an ironic epic of romanticism. A group of artists in Brazil was systematically identified with the Transvanguardia (being referred to as such in the press), producing an expressionist and heroic painting, in a return-to-painting that broke with the influence of the generation of artists born out of the Brazilian neoconcretism of the fifties. One of these artists was Leonilson, and this is one of the significant works from the period which once again linked the art of Brazil to European art. In this phase Leonilson would transform his work into a very delicate process in which drawing (on paper and on embroideries) would assume a very peculiar delicateness, an almost visual poetry via drawing. The epic dimension would be transformed into a lyrical expression, with the bodies morphing into small allegories in which the use of the word stresses the poetic which floats in them. His premature death interrupted this path towards a melancholy intimacy, but his poetics would leave a mark in the context of the generation of artists that began to stand out in the early eighties.Delfim Sardo