Valiente Pastel

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.