MASP

In São Paulo in 1938, Maria Leontina began to study drawing; by 1946 in Rio de Janeiro, she was frequenting the studio of Bruno Giorgi (1905–1993). In 1951 she coordinated the fine arts department of Juquery Psychiatric Hospital in Franco da Rocha, São Paulo. That same year she organized a group exhibition at the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo (MAM) of work produced by patients. She traveled to Paris in 1952 with her husband, painter Milton Dacosta (1915–1988), where they lived until 1954. Over the next decade she designed a tile panel for the Copan Building in São Paulo and won a Guggenheim Foundation award. Though her career began with Figurativism and Abstractionism, Leontina was influenced by the 1950s debate over abstraction, which was profoundly marked both in Brazil and abroad by the Constructivist movement. Gradually, she came to work with abstract themes. However, she developed a particular language in which the rigidity of lines and mathematical calculation of the composition are replaced by an intuitive organization of irregular forms. She dismissed Constructivist dogmas such as the rigor of pure geometry, a monochromism of primary colors and gridded structuring. Her work reveals an overlapping of colors, for instance, among shades of ocher as in Páginas [Pages] (1973), and blues, as in Umbrais, altares [Thresholds, Altars] (1979–80). The artist seems to find her compositions based on observation, study and a formal purification of objects and figurative elements, as indicated by the titles of her works. In Páginas, one can see references to the volume, tonality and movements of a book, which Leontina has freely and abstractedly deconstructed. It is possible to see allusions to the cover, the spine and the pages, with the former well-delineated in white at the center of the composition, allowing an intense light to stand out amid the shapes and colors, a feature even stronger in Umbrais, altares. This title signals the artist’s interest in luminosity, mystery, spirituality and rituals. The radiant center of this piece also alludes to stained glass windows, which the artists reinvents in an abstract and gestural manner. The threshold indicates, beyond a door or passage, an ethereal space or place that is deterritorialized in other dimensions. In the 1970s, Leontina turned her interest to white sheets hanging from clotheslines, which these compositions also may refer to. The artist sought to create metaphysical and spiritual effects through her work; she set forth a concept of painting as representing what is invisible through the visible. It’s as if geometry and science did not offer certainties, but rather profound doubts and worries. Though near the end of her career Leontina increasingly reduced the elements of her paintings to the essential, their lyrical atmosphere persisted.

— Guilherme Giufrida, assistant curator, MASP, 2018

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