Rafael Landea

Café Buenos Aires

Café Buenos Aires (2009), is a visual narrative exploration of the scenes typical in cafés. A café’s architectural space is used as a background against the daily lives of its usual customers. The tables, the chairs, the tablecloths, the waiters, reminds of a theatrical space, all prepared and placed for the theater of life to unfold.

The series includes two juxtaposed elements: “cafés or stages”, and “scenes or mini-plays”. The stages depict imaginary cafés like old photographs which have faded over the years; a “pentimento” where the most recent layer is so thin that allows the viewer to glimpse the past, to feel the passage of time.
The second element are the drawings showing the characters and their actions, decisions and conflicts, accompanied by notes and stage direction, executed in a loose, fast and spontaneous gesture, applied with permanent marker on Plexiglas. These panels are the same size as the acrylics, and are mounted over them. Each café can be a stage for different scenes-plays, as demonstrated by the fact that for each canvas I drew more than one scene on Plexiglas panels. The project is open to constant change: a continuous metamorphosis.

el último café

CBA, El último café

3,300 seconds

CBA, 3,333 seconds

#3 café buenos aires 1
#3 café buenos aires 1 (only canvas)
#3 café buenos aires 1 (only plexiglas)
#2 café buenos aires 2
#2 café buenos aires 2 (only canvas)
#2 café buenos aires 2 (only plexiglas)
#1 café buenos aires 3
#1 café buenos aires 3 (only canvas)
#1 café buenos aires 3 (only plexiglas)
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Rafael Landea

Rafael Landea Artista Visual

A visual artist, Rafael Landea creates paintings and drawings in both traditional and digital media. His artistic style was greatly influenced by an early job as a theater stage designer resulting in artistic interpretations which are deeply narrative and inspired by historical facts, literature, theater, films, music and architecture.
His work has been recognized by institutions such as the San Francisco Arts Commission, Artery Project and Center for Cultural Innovation, plus was featured at Our Radar by Creative Capital New York.

He has shown his paintings at venues worldwide, including:

  • San Francisco, California: The Exploratorium, Grace Cathedral Gallery, Gensler Design.
  • Buenos Aires: Holocaust Museum, Malvinas Museum, Art and Memory Museum and Centro Cultural Haroldo Conti.
  • Participated in collective exhibitions in Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Chile, Brazil, Uruguay and Cuba.

Rafael’s murals can be seen today in Buenos Aires, La Plata and San Francisco. He was lead artistic collaborator on Munú Actis Goretta’s mosaic murals near Turin and in Genoa, Italy.

Rafael has developed illustrations media and publishers in Argentina including Anfibia, Malisia, EME Ediciones B and Universities.

Rafael received his MFA at La Plata University, Argentina and developed his professional career between Buenos Aires and San Francisco. Rafael moved to Catalonia, Spain in 2024

He is developing a digital series inspired by the lives of two Native American men from opposite regions in north and south America, whose stories and destinies present surprising similarities.

[email protected]
@rafael.landea