In Patterns of Transfiguration, Artur Leão takes the natural landscape as his starting point to explore the way in which we attribute meanings, symbols and presences to our surroundings. The black-and-white images depict nature as more than just a backdrop: rocks, water, trees, animals and bodies come together in a visual system where reality and imagination intertwine. A rock cavity appears as a threshold; a weathered tree trunk evokes the contours of a body; whilst a spider’s web amongst the trees traces a delicate, map-like geometry. In other shots, a close-up of a mushroom conjures up a fossilised creature, and a human figure, bent over in the water, seems on the verge of merging with the surrounding environment. Leão explores precisely this instability: nothing is reduced to what it appears to be. Natural matter continues to suggest other forms and other meanings. The imagery draws as much on mythology as on the history of photography. The cave evokes one of its most ancient archetypes – a womb, a tomb or a passage to another realm – whilst water, rock and trees become elements of an almost animistic vocabulary.

A sense of the uncanny emerges – that feeling whereby something familiar suddenly ceases to be so. The same occurs in the portraits, such as that of a dog bathed in an almost supernatural light, which seems to slip away from everyday life to take on the appearance of an apparition. The series is not merely a catalogue of symbols. Its power lies in the way these symbols remain open to interpretation. The photographs do not illustrate a defined mythology, but generate a new one—fragmentary and personal. The eye seeks figures in the rocks, presences in the darkness, signs amongst the branches, following the same impulse that for centuries has led us to project stories onto the constellations or deities onto natural phenomena. In *Patterns of Transfiguration*, the transformation also involves the viewer. The longer one lingers before the images, the more blurred the distinction becomes between organism and landscape, the real and the imagined, life and decay. Nature does not serve as a backdrop: it is the narrative itself, and we merely skim its surface for a moment.