Jean-Pierre Villafañe, whose painting Twelfth Night (2022) appears on the cover of this issue of Art in America, is the subject of a “New Talent” profile in the magazine. From his studio in New York, Villafañe told A.i.A. the backstory of the piece, shown below in full.
The title Twelfth Night comes from a comedy by William Shakespeare that revolves around love, mistaken identity, and complexities of gender, themes that I work with a lot. It’s based on the 12th night after Christmas, a time associated with revelry and the inversion of social norms, which reflects the themes of disguise and transformation that Shakespeare based his play on.
My original training is as an architect: I studied for nine years before I went to work at an office in New York. We were designing a Botox clinic for the World Trade Center, and I decided to shift gears to become a painter, and fused my passion for architecture with painting. Twelfth Night is a painting that exemplifies my exploration of fragmented identity, in characters as well as architecture.
For the characters, I was looking at idiosyncratic personas that we see in downtown New York, such as a Goldman Sachs banker who is a finance bro throughout the day and, when night falls, wears drag. Or a doctor I met in the city who is an anesthesiologist; every night we would go out, he would get plastered, and then the next day he would go perform anesthesia at the hospital. There can be such disparity between a true self and the masks we wear in society. For this work, I decided to collide them in one singular figure, trying to echo this interest in social role-playing.
Jean-Pierre Villafañe: Twelfth Night, 2022.
Courtesy Jean-Pierre Villafañe
The geometric segmentation of faces overlaps with my architectural background and evokes my architectural sensibility. In architecture, when you’re drawing plans, sometimes you’re cutting sections vertically through a building to expose what’s inside, or taking isometric views to distort reality so you can see the top of a building as well as the facade. I’m using these tools of architectural representation to alter the reality of my figural compositions.
When I became a painter, after the pandemic, I felt like interpersonal relationships had shifted, and domestic spaces had become highly public. The house became more or less the total center of human life, in the sense that we were turning houses into offices, schools, and, in some cases, discotheques. I became fascinated by how not only certain characters were wearing masks, but the program of the house had shifted to a new role. In Twelfth Night, you have geometrical segmentation and fragmentation of the human figure, where it’s becoming split, and then also abstract fragmentation that aligns with the way I see the city and its inhabitants as a dynamic, shifting part of a larger narrative.
