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.
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CBA, El último café (quality)
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Rafael Landea received his MFA from La Plata University, Buenos Aires, Argentina. He is a 2011 recipient of a San Francisco Arts Commission Grant for Individual Artists and he was featured in the 2012 “Our Radar”, Creative Capital database of art projects.
His works are included in the public collections at MaM (Museum of Art and Memory), and MPB (Fine Arts Museum Buenos Aires) Argentina.
His most recent solo exhibitions were “1930” Buenos Aires Holocaust Museum, “Maps of Silence”, a multimedia installation at the Exploratorium Museum of Art Science and Human Perception in San Francisco, and “Malvinas” Museum Malvinas (ESMA) Buenos Aires.
Other solo exhibition venues include Grace Cathedral 1055 Gallery, San Francisco, CA, and, Archimboldo Gallery, Buenos Aires, Argentina. Group exhibition highlights include “Performance” at Gensler San Francisco, “Madres de Plaza de Mayo” CC Haroldo Conti, Buenos Aires.
Landea has worked as a set designer and painter for theater in Argentina for more than 15 years. He has also been actively involved in designing and producing murals nationally and internationally; the latest in San Francisco, funded by Artery Project, and collaborations in Turin and Genoa, Italy.
In 2019 created two large murals, Architecture University and the Law Library both in La Plata, Argentina.
He has created illustrations for magazines and books for important Argentinean publishers as Anfibia, Malisia, EME, Ediciones B, and Universities, the latest in 2021: “Malvinas mi Casa” a book based on a diary written in 1829 in Malvinas/Falklands.
Landea was selected for the 2020 Prequalified Artist Pool by San Francisco Arts Commission. 
