Where Danger Lies
Group exhibition featuring works by Valentina Vacó, Bogdan Chaikovskyi, Sheila Cañestro, and Nicolás Romero
January 17 – March 28, 2026
By Pedro Gallegos De Lerma
Where Danger Lies brings together four artists who, through their work—consistently painterly and removed from the immediacy of gesture—reflect on the role of the image in a world saturated with visual stimuli. In the face of iconographic inflation, the exhibition poses a question: how can one create without allowing the power of the image to be domesticated by the market, spectacularization, the purely formal, or the apolitical?
Taking as its starting point the ideas of theorist Hito Steyerl and the Hölderlin quote that gives the exhibition its title, the project engages this tension between image and context in order to position itself within the trace, the wound—within that which may become a gesture of resistance and, perhaps, that which can still save.
In this sense, we believe there is no medium more powerful for entering the scar of our time than painting. It is a medium we have defended in every exhibition at the gallery because it continues to challenge us through its symbolic dimension and its capacity to function simultaneously as mirror and wound. Painting is understood here not as an immediate gesture, but as a process that develops slowly—one that demands to be thought, imagined, and conceived in the mind long before taking form in the hand. A mental matter, as Leonardo da Vinci already warned.
Our reality dissolves into an incessant flow of recombined images. Visual arts are therefore compelled to confront an urgent question: how can one create without allowing the power of the image to be domesticated by the market, spectacularization, the purely formal, or the apolitical? In The Wretched of the Screen, Hito Steyerl argues that images have ceased to be mere representations and have become active agents in the world—mobile fragments carrying both the traces of their production and the wounds of the system that manufactures and recirculates them. Against the “rich image,” Steyerl defends the political force of the “poor image”: degraded, insurgent, emerging from elsewhere, originating in the margins. An image that becomes testimony, scar, and challenge to the logic of visual capital.
“But where danger is, grows / The saving power also.” Hölderlin guides this exhibition, which understands the image as a territory of risk and possibility. From this space emerges critical potential—what resists superficiality, reveals fissures within the system, and opens the possibility of thinking otherwise.
It is within this tension that the artists gathered here situate their work. They explore how fragility, excess, fragmentation, or trace may become gestures of resistance and, perhaps, that which still manages to save.
The Artists
Valentina Vacó
Far from seeking mere visual seduction, Valentina Vacó aims to destabilize—to create situations in which the viewer is placed in the same state as the figures inhabiting her paintings: a deliberately constructed balance and tension that compels them—and us—to remain alert, attentive to ambiguity and deception, to what lies hidden beneath the surface.
Her scenes have gradually shed excess and saturation and now appear almost essential, traversed by a corporeal and vibrating smoke that alludes to ephemerality, fragility, and risk—to that fleeting instant in which everything may change abruptly, in a constant pulse between the transient and the eternal, between the attraction of beauty and the certainty of its inevitable fading.
After studying at Central Saint Martins, Valentina Vacó (Caracas, 1994) completed a BA in Photography at the Institute of Photographic Studies of Catalonia in Barcelona. She currently lives and works in Madrid, where she maintains her studio in Carabanchel and focuses on painting. She has presented solo exhibitions in galleries and institutions in Madrid, London, Caracas, Barcelona, and Andorra. Her work is held in private collections in Spain, the United Kingdom, Venezuela, and France.