Leo Macias is a Colombian-Brazilian artist who lives and works between Los Angeles and São Paulo, having previously lived in New York.

His artistic and creative journey has unfolded over more than three decades, moving between his work as an Art Director and Creative Director and his deep exploration as a visual artist, with international recognition in both fields.

He studied Design in Colombia and, while living in New York, expanded his studies with art courses at Parsons School of Design. However, the most defining element in his artistic development was the rich cultural and family environment in Colombia. He grew up surrounded by influences that shaped his vision and led him to develop a unique visual language, marked by a poetic fusion of human and natural elements, deconstructing everyday objects and symbols to reveal new narratives and meanings.

His research is deeply rooted in the Latin American experience and expands into a global dialogue on displacement, imperfectly poetic journeys and the persistence of memory in everyday life. His practice is guided by the belief that every human gesture carries a trace of our journey, transforming everyday objects and symbols into carriers of memories and invisible stories.

His work carries powerful symbols about life and the human journey, creating unique, intense and inspiring narratives. Roses sprouting from hands and fingers, feet covered in thorns and blossoming branches appear as recurring elements, shaping playful works that celebrate beauty and imperfection. He works with painting, sculpture, photography and installation, exploring diverse surfaces such as paper, wood, plastic and fabric, and incorporating both found everyday objects and natural elements like branches and thorns. These materials, combined with his singular way of seeing the world, become narratives that investigate memory, identity, transformation and evolution, revealing within their meanings personal moments and stages of his own journey.

Among his creations are a series of wooden suitcases representing non-existent destinations, complete with maps and memories invented by the artist, places where, in his imagination, he truly lived; hands whose fingers playfully transform into roses; and transparent mailboxes titled Trying to Find Myself, in which he writes letters to himself, turning the work into an ongoing dialogue that will only end with his death. These gestures, meticulously creating imaginary places and inhabiting them in his fantasy, or writing letters to himself as if building an infinite intimate archive, are not merely works but ways of inhabiting time and rewriting one’s own existence.

Exploring different media, materials and sensations, Macias has participated in solo and group exhibitions in Brazil, Colombia, France and the United States, including his current exhibition at MIS, the Museum of Image and Sound in São Paulo. These poetic and personal gestures have become unmistakable visual and conceptual signatures of his work.

His production, at once intimate and universal, is an invitation to be lived, collected and preserved as a visual testimony of our time, showing that the journey, even when distant from traditional ideals of perfection, manifests the poetry that emerges from imperfection.