Poignant Portfolio no. 27: Ana Leal
395 Days and Counting is an essay composed of images produced during quarantine due to Covid-19. Most of them were taken at my apartment in São Paulo, Brazil, and reflect this period of a contemplative mood when time seemed suspended. This is a diary about the isolation experienced during these days.
I started this quarantine thinking about opportunities the isolation could uncover: a needed time for contemplation and a slower pace of living. Slowly I became self-conscious about my living space, my body, and my emotions. Guided by this contemplative state of mind, my gaze reconfigured the sense of the simple. An empty place of silence, a harmonic cadence that registered apparent insignificance.
The rarefied morning light announces a new day that sneaks in through the window, moves through the curtain weave to warmly illuminate our intimacy. At the end of the day, the light is gone, and with it many times my energy too. Moods change. Contradictory emotions cohabit in an often tired body. The notion of time and space is confusing now. Sometimes it feels as if I am vanishing. There is, however, this infinite beauty that pulsates in the small details, which usually goes unnoticed in our daily routines. Capturing this sensation throws me into an ethereal, delicate and melancholic atmosphere. Observing the images, I am moved to this timeless place of diffuse spatiality. It seems that I am denying the existence of things in their time as an escape from reality.
The images presented in this collection are observations from the everyday personal moments that poetically document what it means to be living through the time of the pandemic.
About the Artist
Brazilian photographer Ana Leal born in Northeast Brazil is an artist who works primarily in photography. She considers photography to be a tool for both depicting and escaping from reality and explores these possibilities through ideas surrounding memory, the passage of time, and empty spaces. She is inspired by Minimalism and the Concretism movement in Brazil, as well as Impressionist painters. Through simple images, abstractions, and photographic collages, she aims to share the beauty of simplicity by depicting natural environments and everyday life, focusing on minutiae, like the details and the sensation of these environments, capturing their fragility and fugacity. Her editing process consists of pairing down photographs to depict stillness and structure, and often exhibit her works as diptychs or triptychs printed on various media, such as paper, canvas, and aluminum. In support of a contemplative lifestyle, her hope is to offer introspective space for the viewers through the work.
Leal is a Gold Award winner on the 2020 Tokyo International Foto Awards and the 15th Julia Margaret Cameron Award Winner both in the abstract category. She also received an Honorable Mention on Prix de La Photographie Paris and on the 15th Pollux Awards as on Latin America 7. Her work has been exhibited across the United States and Brazil. She was nominated “Artist of the Future "by Contemporary Art Curator Magazine in 2020 and has been published at Envision Arts Magazine, Thought art Magazine, and Dodho Magazine.
Leal (b. 1969) currently works and lives in São Paulo, Brazil. She completed her MFA at Miami International University of Arts and Design (2018).
From the Editor
Hello readers, thanks for reading and taking this journey with us. On a personal note, life has been a little hectic. Not overwhelming, just busy, and a bit scattered. So in an effort to add peace and calm I often turn to art to balance things out. This makes this meditative series by Ana Leal so poignant for me personally but it’s also so very topical. I reviewed Leal’s portfolio last fall for Click! Portfolio Reviews and what struck me the most was the calmness in the images, the zen if you will. Leal has mastered the art of abstraction balanced with snippets that are recognizably photographic. Her observations feel dreamy and considering the times we live in, they can also be interpreted as uneasy or melancholy. Whatever your reaction, I hope Leal’s work reminds you that some of the best photographs are taken with intuition, not planning. Thank you to Ana Leal for sharing her beautiful project with us!
–Blue Mitchell @onetwelveprojects