Jean-Pierre Villafañe (b. 1992, Puerto Rico) earned his Master’s in Architecture from Columbia University in New York in 2019. Prior to that, he completed his Bachelor’s degree in Architecture at SCAD, concluding his final year of studies in Hong Kong, where he focused on the implications of urban conditions for social mobilization. His work has been featured internationally, including at Charles Moffett, New York, NY (2024); Diablo Rosso, Panama City, PA (2023); The Armory Fair, New York, NY (2023); Nino Mier Gallery, New York, NY (2023); Galerie Hussenot, Paris, FR (2022); Hoffmann Maler Wallenberg, Nice, FR (2022); The Yale School of Architecture, New Haven, CT (2022); Museo de Arte y Diseño, San José, CR (2021); and Galería Embajada, San Juan, PR (2021), among others. In 2024, he was selected as a resident artist for the year-long Silver Arts residency program at 4 World Trade Center in NYC. In 2023, he was awarded the TPC Art Finance Prize for 'the most exceptional and innovative presentation' at The Armory Fair. In 2023, he completed three large murals for the restaurant Cecchi’s in West Village, which have been featured in renowned publications such as The New York Times, Forbes, The New Yorker, New York Magazine, Dezeen, and Vogue. His work was recently featured on the cover of the winter issue of Art in America. Jean-Pierre's studio practice is based in Chinatown, New York City.
Jean-Pierre Villafañe’s work operates at the intersection of painting and performance, where roles fracture, architectures dissolve, and theatricality dominates. Figures slip in and out of their own reflections, caught in the act of becoming—exaggerated, distorted, and delightfully uncertain. A former architect, Villafañe approaches the canvas as both a construction site and a stage, where layered spaces collapse into psychological interiors, and bodies exist in a state of flux. His compositions revel in a carnivalesque dance between power and illusion, fantasy and deviance, submission and irreverence. Characters don masks—sometimes literal, sometimes metaphoric—oscillating between self-possession and self-parody. Public and private self, status, and social roles blur, slipping between pastiche and sincerity. The geometric segmentation of faces hints at the built environment, recalling how both cities and identities are assembled from fragments, juxtapositions, and erasures. A muted palette punctuated by sumptuous textiles and theatrical flourishes situates his work in a liminal space: part technocratic dystopia, part burlesque stage, part fever dream. Villafañe’s paintings flirt with art-historical undertones while refusing to take themselves too seriously. They play in the seduction of excess, the absurdity of decorum, and the irrepressible urge to escape one’s prescribed role. Figures lounge, drape, perform, or resist, their gestures frozen somewhere between choreography and collapse. Whether portraying boardroom intrigue or classical absurdity, his work insists that to inhabit space—whether architectural or societal—is to engage in an ongoing, ever-shifting act of role-playing.