First Approach: Training the Gaze
In a time when digital images seem to have become background noise, Leo Ureña’s artistic practice emerges as an exercise in distinction—not through spectacle or loudness, but precisely through its attention to the minimal. His compositions, born from an almost ritual accumulation of everyday records, reveal a sustained sensitivity to what escapes common sight: the fleeting reflection, the unexpected shadow, the barely visible texture. In his work, the image is not presented as a document but as an echo—a visual reverberation of what the eye intuits before it understands.
Leo Ureña’s first photographs did not initially intend to be artworks. They were backgrounds for posters, visual essays, compositions in search of balance for what was then his main world: design. With a pocket camera or phone in hand, he began capturing the city during his daily commutes. He walked from home to work, from work to the taxi, and in those in-between moments, shadows, reflections, and the colors of concrete would appear. Photography wasn’t yet an end, but a way of seeing, of sharpening the gaze. The practice became constant and self-taught. Ureña taught himself what a frame could contain; he learned to calibrate color and temperature, to be affected by what appears without asking permission. Often, these images lacked a clear subject—they were suspended spaces, architectural details that verge on the painterly. As he himself says: “the camera started to feel more like a drawing machine.”
Accustomed to looking, Leo began to notice recurring themes: shadow, the softness within the hard, contrasts bordering on balance. Without seeking it, his photos engaged more with painting references than with photography: a light might evoke Impressionism, a surface the silence of a Suprematist, a composition the serenity of Buddhism.
This exhibition gathers the traces of that initial impulse: a practice born from design but surrendered to observation, to a daily search for forms that—though invisible to many—insist on being seen. As if the walking eye could also think. As if looking had always been a way of inhabiting.
Collage: What’s Possible
But beyond the act of photographing—which for Ureña is already a deeply intimate gesture—what sets his body of work apart is the way he intervenes in or edits those images. His method of digital collage, developed autodidactically and experimentally on his phone, follows a precise internal structure, with self-imposed rules that allow chance to become form, and the fragmentary to acquire coherence.
From his first exercises, created during urban commutes, Ureña began to build his own visual system: a frame within a frame, layers of superimposed images that had to coincide in at least three points—a line, a texture, a form that engages with another—to be considered “resolved.” This process, which might seem intuitive, is loaded with compositional rigor. As if the final image weren’t the result of a simple technical gesture, but the conclusion of a visual score. He has described his work as a kind of musical exercise, where photographs function like chords that must resonate in harmony.
Here, collage is not rupture, but architecture. It’s not about fragmenting to destroy, but fragmenting to find a more complex, denser, more open unity. Ureña starts with the everyday—a sidewalk, a facade, a shadow cast on the ground—and subjects it to a process of synthesis where each element maintains its identity but engages with another, creating new constellations. The result is not a chaotic juxtaposition, but a form of visual abstraction that is deeply formalist, yet full of emotion.
Landscapes of the Possible
Ureña continued this process almost organically. His photographs of the city gain strength through their capacity for emptiness. Cities, objects, spaces disappear as such and become visual fields: zones of tension, repetition, rhythm. Ureña distances himself from the documentary or narrative gesture to place himself in an intermediate territory between photography, painting, and architecture. Abstraction, here, is the result of a gaze trained in silence, in repetition, in pause.
This silence is not emptiness as absence, but emptiness as potential—a space of containment where the image is built as much by what is absent as by what is shown. Ureña’s work reconfigures emptiness not as negation, but as a fertile site for visual experience. In his compositions, white is not background but breath. The edge is not a boundary, but an opening. The frame does not enclose—it suggests.
Abstraction does not eliminate the real, but it distills it. In many of his works, the original image is transformed to the point of being unrecognizable. It doesn’t matter whether it was taken in San José, Guanacaste, or from the top of a building. What remains is a visual structure where place dissolves into rhythm, color, geometry. The repetition of motifs—circles, windows, cables, reflections—generates a visual vocabulary that seeks not meaning but resonance. These are images not meant to be interpreted, but felt.
In the tradition of modern art, abstraction was often a way to universalize visual language, stripping it of context. But in Ureña’s case, abstraction is crossed by the everyday, the intimate, the emotional. It is an abstraction born from a lingering gaze, from the desire to order chaos. Not a distant aesthetic, but one deeply close. It does not seek to transcend life, but to reorganize it.
Insistence is also part of his method. Ureña has said he takes thousands of photos, many of which may never be shown. But within that accumulation lies a profoundly artistic gesture: the construction of an emotional archive, a private universe that settles and clarifies over time. Each image is, then, a decision—a moment when something, out of all possibilities, finds its form.
This archive is not only personal, but also collective. Even when his images do not directly represent people or recognizable scenes, they evoke a shared experience: that of inhabiting a city that transforms, that hides, that reveals itself only in reflection. That of walking and seeing nothing—until one learns to look.
This exhibition is not a retrospective nor a closed series. It is a state of process, a window into the method. Leo Ureña works from a quiet fidelity: to form, to color, to intuition, to space. His work does not seek to impress, but to endure. It does not aim to teach, but to accompany. And it does so from a gaze that, without loudness, insists.
It insists on emptiness.
It insists on abstraction.
It insists on the power of an image that, by becoming almost nothing, becomes essential.
Text by Cristina Ramírez León
