Valentina Bravo – Pesadillas, what were your dreams as a child?
Pesadillas – Nightmares – aims to explore the imaginary between memory, imagination, and the act of painting and insisting on remembering ethereal images that become material practice. It can examine the ways in which childhood memories—both dreamlike and unsettling—persist into the adulthood mind, shaping perception, emotional resonance, and expression.

Pesadillas seeks to study the idea of having bad dream, the suffering of existing as a child, or the nonsense that means to be alive. Things that make no sense, and the notion of exploring images of a rather obscure early life are planned to be quoted. However, the experiment aims to be an artwork by itself, without any trapping description. Some elements of humor and chaos are around as always. This time, the different medium can bring new challenges and hopefully some interesting highlights. The project is open for discussions during the making and there is no aim of an up-tight environment during the show, but a gathering of drinking and painting.

The work unfolds directly on the gallery wall as a live painting process. The medium in question, is employed to investigate layering, opacity, and translucency, reflecting the stratified and mutable nature of memory itself. Sources of imagery include recollections from the artist’s childhood in Chile, which can be reinterpreted through experimentation with color, mark-making, and scale. The act of spending time painting is an act by itself of resistance, and it’s enough. The visual outcome is unknown. The art piece will be available for visiting in the gallery for two weeks.

Valentina Bravo
1988 Santiago, Chile
@valentina.brava

Valentina Bravo is a Chilean-born painter based in Helsinki whose work investigates memory, identity, and displacement through large-scale, process-driven painting. Her practice engages with the interplay between personal experience and collective histories, drawing on both her migratory life between Chile and Finland and her broader engagement with visual culture. Using layered techniques, expressive mark-making, and textured surfaces, Bravo’s paintings explore the persistence of memory, childhood imagery, and emotional landscapes, situating intimate narratives within expansive visual frameworks. Her work has been exhibited internationally across Europe and Scandinavia, and she engages both the studio and the public space as sites for experimentation and reflection, emphasizing the performative and temporal dimensions of painting.

By foregrounding process, materiality, and gesture, Bravo’s practice examines how memory and identity are constructed, challenged, and reconfigured, offering audiences a lens into the ongoing negotiation between personal history and contemporary visual experience.