Jean-Pierre Villafañe’s Riotous Paintings Upend Corporate Drudgery
The sprawling World Trade Center complex boasts dozens of stores, cafeterias, and restaurants—amenities common in office buildings alongside perks like gyms and even spas. Working from the 4 World Trade Center studio where he is currently an artist in residence at Silver Art Projects, Jean-Pierre Villafañe has a front-row seat to one of the main stages of corporate America: New York’s Financial District. “The corporate environment is very much ingrained in U.S. culture,” the artist said. “Offices [are] designed for you to never leave with the purpose of working as much as possible—it almost becomes your second home.”
Villafañe has made this corporate setting the subject of his latest body of work, on view in “Playtime” at Charles Moffett in New York through August 2nd. Comprising paintings, drawings, and a diorama, “Playtime” was inspired by the artist’s “unexpected viewpoint as an ‘outsider’ into the intricacies of technocratic environments…and explores the theme of power, both real and illusory,” he explained. In each work, figures dressed in corporate clothes (all in tones of black and white, including several in matching white dress shirts with black ties, pants, and shoes) engage in their daily routines—clocking in, riding the elevator, attending meetings—in spartan, grid-like offices and seemingly endless corridors with gray concrete walls and burnt-red carpeting. Their clothes and their activities, however, devolve into salacious chaos, as figures abandon their well-rehearsed performances and professional façades for lascivious expressions and glimpses of butts and breasts that burst through open shirts and dresses.
Portrait of Jean-Pierre Villafañe. Courtesy of Charles Moffett.
Villafañe’s fantastical world, he said, is a “theatrical portrayal of a day in a dystopian office that celebrates curiosity: a cheerful yet unsettlingly familiar world filled with skyscrapers, long corridors, and surveillance [in which] characters seek to escape their mundane lives and assume powerful roles through their daytime fantasies.”
With a background in architecture, Villafañe has a keen eye for the built environment. Some spaces he depicts are taken straight from real life, such as the red rugs and brutalist concrete in the building visible across from his residency. Others derive from corporate culture and the modernist architecture of Lower Manhattan more broadly.
Despite the focus on the workplace, the works on view are sensual and carnivalesque. The figures are angular, geometric, and tightly structured, as if choreographed. “Fashion, much like architecture, plays a critical role in shaping identity and creating performative narratives,” the artist said. In some works, subjects’ corporate attire is adorned with patterns, and dramatized, campy makeup verges on drag with faces that mirror the arches, columns, and distinct shadows of the buildings. “By accentuating angularity and structure, the faces appear closer to masks, behind which identities cannot be revealed and true origins are concealed,” Villafañe said.
“Playtime” includes a diorama of a skyscraper (a nod to the artist’s architectural training) filled with workers at their desks dressed in their corporate attire. Inside, the walls are mirrored, so the viewer sees glimpses of themself peering back, adding a sense of voyeurism. This act of peering occurs again in the paintings Gentle Reminder (all works 2024) and One-to-One, in which tiny heads peek through small squares, watching unsuspecting figures caught in frenetic poses. It’s unclear where these peeping figures are located. In One-to-One, the voyeur looks into an elevator suspended in darkness, leaving the viewer to imagine the remainder of the building. In Gentle Reminder, space is further distorted and the figure watching the main subject resembles a floating head at the end of a long corridor.
Architectural logic is fully abandoned in Overtime, in which heads peek over freestanding, enclosed cubicles that resemble a labyrinth. Indeed, throughout the show, Villafañe uses space to play with perception. Exaggerated vanishing points and elongated lines confuse the viewer’s sense of reality, as if the rigid, linear corporate settings are spinning into a fantastical, dreamlike world of dance, joy, and sensuality.
Ultimately, the artist explained, “Playtime” is a humorous invitation for self-reflection: “I hope viewers gain a satirical and theatrical perspective on the corporate environment with a feeling of curiosity, surprise, and irreverence while trespassing into these two-dimensional and three-dimensional worlds, questioning the seriousness and intensity of their own office lives,” he said.
