Valiente Pastel
Small World
May 16 – July 3, 2026
Opening Reception
May 16, 5 – 7PM
Valiente Pastel (b. 1989) is a Costa Rican artist focusing on queerness, eroticism, vulnerability and class struggle. His source material consists of found images from print media, including vintage porn magazines, nude playing cards, and his own personal Polaroids. Pastel is interested in rescuing what has been forgotten, thrown away, or deemed inappropriate, and turning it into something intimate, poetic and provocative.
His painterly manipulation of photographic images is seemingly simple, yet transformationally profound. He often paints over the exposed skin of erotic figures with a consistently flat, pale, pinkish flesh tone, in part to emphasize their predominant "whiteness." The nipples are usually white dots and the faces are reduced to a pair of googly eyes and a red smile. His playful, somewhat childish naïveté render these sexually charged figures with an air of approachability, turning a full-frontal erection into a guilt-free, comical, uninhibited pleasure. The shame of looking and enjoying is immediately dialed down to zero.
In Small World, his first solo exhibition in the US, an image of a woman taking nude selfies is no longer seen as trying to elicit arousal, but rather innocently and perhaps even shyly exploring herself. Other images address vulnerable quotidian moments such as a street vendor ducking under her table of produce during an unexpected rain. Their simple red smile has turned to a frown of despair and this subtle alteration to the image automatically engenders our heightened compassion. An image of a child riding a carnival train while their father looks on, neither of them smiling, produces a full-blown narrative of childhood and parental expectations, as well as the poignancy of precious moments in time.