As a painter and multidisciplinary artist, Yuri Leal approaches the act of image-making through language. Trained in classical techniques yet largely self-taught, he merges traditional European craftsmanship with a contemporary sensitivity to concept and form. His practice moves fluidly between drawing, painting, and text-based work, exploring how words themselves can occupy space—how they can carry emotional weight and visual presence.

 

Leal’s compositions often begin with written fragments taken from personal diaries—records of love, displacement, and reflection. These words evolve into landscapes, shaping dunes, fields, and clouds where memory becomes matter. His process blurs the boundaries between reading and seeing, between thought and terrain.

 

By grounding his visual language in writing, Leal creates a world where emotion is architecture. Each word becomes a structural element, forming topographies of feeling that transcend literal meaning. His work invites viewers to engage not only with image, but with the inner vibration of text—its rhythm, silence, and breath.

 

Born in 1992 in Brazil, Leal studied at the Fine Arts School of São Paulo before relocating to the Netherlands. He lives in Amsterdam and produces his work in Haarlem. His visual research reflects a dialogue between the South and the North, between natural light and emotional shadow.

 

In his recent series, Written Landscapes, Leal reimagines painting as a site of translation—between languages, geographies, and states of mind. His works remind us that words, like landscapes, are inhabited: they hold histories, transform with time, and reveal the intimate terrain of being human.