Hoffmann + Maler + Wallenberg is pleased to announce Fireworks, the gallery’s first solo exhibition of Jean-Pierre Villafañe. It includes ten paintings and three sculptures, all made in 2022.

Villafañe’s studies in architecture play an enormous role in his work. Three of the paintings, Nightshift, Funny Games, and Beneath the Suit, depict larger groups of people at a party or some other festivity in a curious indoor environment. We find characters with clown faces among this jolly and surreal cast; others are dressed like sailors, soldiers, or priests. It is unclear where one body begins and another ends in the hazy trance. Elongated arms, drawn-out legs, even heads seemingly without bodies are overlaid and interconnected.

These get-togethers bring to mind descriptions of extravagant nightlife during Weimar-era Berlin or wild, uninhibited parties at speakeasies during American Prohibition. There is a feeling of self-indulgence, of dancing-on-the-edge-of-the world hedonism. This universe is playful and animated, yet with a gloomy undercurrent.

The bodies seem to move in a geometrical choreography as they engage in close conversation with the architecture around them. Arches, circles, and vertical and diagonal lines appear and reappear, revealing the formal basis for the compositions. After the Curfew, Doctor Gin, and Left, Right could be close-ups of the surreal personages depicted in the larger canvases. Doctor Gin seems to have just stepped out of an operating room, and is now relaxing with a martini and a cigarette. The figure in Left, Right is dressed in a black tuxedo, wearing heavy makeup, and likewise enjoying a cocktail.

Throughout his work, Villafañe addresses sensual attraction, androgyny, eroticism, and sexual ambiguity in varied ways. In Infatuation and Twelfth Night, are we witnessing two lovers so mutually enchanted that they become one? Or are they merging twins, maybe Shakespeare’s famous gender-bending siblings Viola and Sebastian?

Fireworks is accompanied by the first-ever monograph on Villafañe’s work, published by HMW Books.