Metamorphoses brings together works made between 1991 and 2025, spanning more than three decades of this investigation. Ferreira works directly on the Polaroid while the image is still forming, when the emulsion remains vulnerable and unstable. A gesture is enough to disturb what might otherwise settle into permanence. Colours shift, forms dissolve, contours lose their certainty. What was photographed remains, but something else begins to emerge.

In this series, photography becomes a place where intention and chance meet, each shaping what the other cannot fully control. The physical presence of the image matters as much as what it depicts, turning the photograph into a site of discovery in its own right. Rather than manipulating reality, Luísa Ferreira explores what may remain unseen within the act of looking, making images that withhold an immediate answer and ask us to spend more time with them.

“Photography became my way of observing and communicating with the world,” Ferreira says. Perhaps these words offer a key to this work. To observe is not necessarily to explain or possess what is seen. It can mean remaining attentive to what escapes us, to what is still becoming visible. As she puts it, photography is “the creative side, but through the gaze.” The gaze is therefore not passive. It is a gesture. And the image is not fixed. It continues to happen.

In Metamorphoses, photography approaches painting, sculpture and the object without abandoning its photographic nature. The works occupy an uncertain territory between representation and invention, between the trace of reality and the freedom of imagination. Their beauty lies partly in this instability: they always seem to be becoming something else.

There is, finally, a personal story I cannot separate from this exhibition. In 1993, I bought my first photographic work by an artist. It was a photograph by Luísa Ferreira, shown at Armazém AB do Porto de Lisboa in an exhibition whose title came from a line by Francis Picabia. Until then, I had believed that collecting the photobooks of the artists I admired was enough. That photograph changed something. It made me understand that an image could leave the pages of a book and enter everyday life: we could wake up beside it, pass it every day, see it change with the light and, without noticing, allow it to become part of our own memory.

That first purchase was, in its own small way, the beginning of a habit. Today, more than fifty photographs hang on the walls of my home. Three of them are by Luísa Ferreira. Looking back, it is perhaps not difficult to see a connection between that first photograph and the creation, many years later, of Lumina Galeria. Both came from the same belief: that photography can be more than something we look at. It can become something we live with.

Bruno Portela

Lisboa, September 2026