Peluche Express

JOSE GARCIA OLIVA – DANIEL GREENFIELD-CAMPOVERDE – MARIA HELENA TOSCANO – LUCIA VERA.

Opening: 11 June 6-9 pm

12-20 June 2026

Peluche Express brings together four Venezuelan artists whose practices treat memory as labour through an ongoing process of reconstruction, translation, and imagination shaped by distance, where fictional nostalgia and desire exist in constant contradiction.

The exhibition takes its name from a series of stickers commonly found on porpuestos—informal modes of public transportation in Caracas. These decals form an aesthetic universe of their own, blending religious imagery, folk references, and vernacular Venezuelan humour, often charged with erotic or irreverent undertones.

We were drawn to the word peluche—teddy bear—as an object associated with childhood, comfort, and protection. As one of the artists reflected in conversation, despite the risks involved in returning to Venezuela, it remains the place where one feels safest, most at home. This tension between danger and intimacy underpins the exhibition’s emotional and conceptual framework. Where Express, in many Latin American countries, recalls the idea of secuestro express, a temporary kidnapping. Peluche Express draws on this tension, staging the theft of a memory for seconds at a time, long enough to feel back again, before the distance reasserts itself.

At a critical historical moment, as Venezuela enters a period of political uncertainty and potential transition, Peluche Express asks: how might memory-as-labour offer new ways of understanding Venezuelan art produced abroad? How can practices rooted in distance, fracture, and return become productive sites for dialogue—reframing ideas of belonging, nationhood, and cultural continuity beyond the borders of the state?