Jean-Pierre Villafane

Region: Northeast

Looking at the world through the eye of a trained architect, my pictorial work traverses the intersection between figurative painting and architecture, while drawing from an expansive breadth of idiosyncratic associations to present irreverent compositions. I construct social environments exploring notions of intimacy, sexuality, and self-concept in a satirical and macabre fashion. Through the intermingling of carnival figures, my paintings examine the inescapable performativity of being. Inscribed in social settings such as bars, museums, public squares, or cultural centers, the characters—arrested in moments of decadence and indulgence—dance, drink, and sing in an overlapping and hyperconnected manner. My satyrical choreographies brim with rhythms and striking colors, elicit ambivalent states rich in irony, joy, tenderness, and contempt. These scenes of social abundance stand in contrast to a present-day reality in which boundaries between public life and the domestic have been suddenly obliterated, feeding an impulse to reconfigure interpersonal relationships and examine the way in which bodies move through spaces.