Leonardo Ureña

Leonardo Ureña, blending his graphic design background with photography, challenges the prevailing selfie culture with a reflective approach that prioritises capturing spaces and emotions for a more mindful photography experience. Drawing from various artistic inspirations, he manipulates light and compositions like a painter, emphasising atmosphere and mood over specific subjects, in either natural landscapes and urban settings.

When documenting Costa Rica’s landscapes, Ureña captures beaches, skies, and wildlife, focusing on intricate details to render them abstract and offering a fresh perspective beyond traditional representations of colour and texture.

Extending his work beyond Costa Rica’s natural world, Ureña has created a series focusing on rooftops in the country’s capital city, San José. The rooftop series portrays the rapid and haphazard urban growth experienced in San José, highlighting the chaotic environment of city-living. Ureña also looks outside of Costa Rica in his “Squares within squares” series that features a series of collages inspired by his practice of editing and photographing urban spaces. Presenting the energy of New York, Mexico City and San José, Ureña overlays multiple images, contrasting different contexts and exploring the possibilities of photography.

Ureña’s storytelling transcends surface impressions, exposing the atmosphere of the places he explores. Combining graphic design principles with acute observation, his work resonates with the evolving spirit of each location.

Why We Love This Artist
Leonardo takes a fraction of a scene — a detail of beach, foliage, or rooftop — and renders it into something else entirely, abstract and painterly, pulled so close that the original subject almost disappears. That approach works equally in his urban series, where small areas of colour from the streets of San José become studies in energy and light. His work is genuinely unlike anything we had seen before we came across it, and recognition is growing fast.