49 3/8 x 39 3/8 in
Perpetual Journey marks Brian De Jesus’ (b.1996, Caracas, Venezuela, lives and works in London) second solo presentation at Hope 93 and represents a significant evolution in both material and conceptual scope. While continuing his sustained engagement with migration (as a Venezuelan national who migrated to London), labour, and invisibility under contemporary capitalism, this new body of work compresses lived experience more tightly than ever before with the overlapping realities of being a delivery driver, a migrant, and an artist converging more clearly than before.
Central to the exhibition are repurposed delivery bags collected from around the world; objects designed to be seen everywhere and noticed by no one. Once functional, now unusable, they operate here as charged symbols of disposability. De Jesus has spent the last three years collecting delivery bags from Europe, Latin America, and North America. The diverse geographies of the bag's origins serve as a thread to link to the various migratory journeys worldwide, and the shared experiences of individuals thrown into precarity by the political climates that insist on migration. The bags become symbols of anonymity, mirroring that of the workers who carry them, typically an invisible workforce rendered interchangeable by app-based labour systems, where human bodies are treated with the same expendability as the software that governs them. By stripping, stretching, and painting over these bags, De Jesus transforms them into sites of collision, where unseen labour, migration, and capital converge.
Across the works, inscriptions and engravings are present in the canvases. Lists of numbers, payment calculations, and phrases such as “7H” or “Sweet Rain” reference the brutal arithmetic of gig labour—journeys that can amount to hours of work for as little as £2, often undertaken in dangerous and unforgiving conditions. Etched permanently into canvases destined for collectors and institutions, these markings introduce an irony, the economic precarity of migrant labour becomes embedded within objects of cultural value. This contradiction, one between invisibility and desirability, erosion and elevation is central to this body of work.
Historically, De Jesus has inscribed his canvases in Spanish. In this body of work, English appears exclusively. This shift is deliberate. English functions here as the language of capitalism and colonial power, but also as a tool of direct address—making the critique of migrant labour systems unmistakably legible to the public that benefits from them.
Formally, the exhibition signals a profound transformation. It is De Jesus’ most vibrant and chromatically cohesive body of work yet. While earlier paintings drew sporadically from the visual noise of street culture and graffiti, colour here is harmonic, and intentional. This shift reflects a recent extended return to Caracas, his first prolonged period outside London in many years. Painting previously from a place of displacement, shaped by London’s greyscale environment and psychic compression, De Jesus describes this return as transformative. Immersed once again in the colours of markets, streets, people, and tropical flora, his perception and absorption of place changed, and that change is carried directly into the canvases.
The application of colour also draws from a technological source; the delivery app itself. From a driver’s perspective, the app generates a constantly shifting heat-map of labour—routes intensifying from blue and green into yellow, orange, red, and white as frequency increases. These abstract maps of human traffic are transposed into the paintings through pooling pigments and kinetic streaks, visualising migration not only as movement across borders, but as daily repetition through urban space.
Structurally, many works are presented as diptychs. One panel functions as a painted canvas, the other as a tapestry of decommissioned delivery bags, stretched and worked as a surface in their own right. The balance between the two is never fixed—some works lean heavily toward labour-material, others toward painted gesture. These shifting ratios reflect the instability of time, income, and energy that defines migrant gig work: the constant negotiation between work and labour.
Together, these works articulate a practice in transition—one that no longer only documents displacement, but actively reframes it. In making the invisible visible, and the disposable enduring, De Jesus continues to erode the hierarchies that render certain lives unseen, insisting instead there be room.