THE CURATOR
Juanfran has spent twenty-five years working with image, space and light. He has photographed architecture, directed his own art magazine, designed more than a hundred interior design projects and made an art career of his own. Today he paints daily in his Seville studio and curates collections for Yachay.
Each craft taught him a different way of seeing and feeling spaces, light, colors and shapes. Together they make a curator who reads a room before choosing what goes in it, and who knows what an art piece asks of its wall, its light and the people who live beside it.
He trained at Centro de la Imagen 'Ojo Ajeno' in Lima, under Roberto Huarcaya, a key figure in Peruvian contemporary photography. He then photographed high-end architecture and interiors for El Comercio, Peru's oldest newspaper, founded in 1839, and for leading architects. He learned to read a space and its light before he arranged one.
Founder of Galería, an independent magazine about contemporary art, architecture and design. He curated what it showed and how its stories were told. It taught him that every selection is an argument.
Founder of Artística Estudio, a boutique interior design studio that completed more than a hundred residential and commercial projects, designing custom furniture and building his own large-format photography into the rooms. He learned how art lives in a space, and what it needs from it.
He brings to life large-scale pieces that combine geometric abstraction, halftone patterns and ancestral iconography. After thirty years of meditation practice, his constant investigation of his own mind has led him to search for ways to represent mental worlds and the energetic power of the human mind through his work. He has held three solo shows at Índigo Gallery in Lima and one at Vanesa Matas Gallery in Mallorca, and has shown in group exhibitions at Origen Gallery in Madrid and at People Gallery in Madrid, Venice and Buenos Aires. He learned what it takes to make a work, and to stand behind one. In April 2027, in collaboration with the Peruvian embassy in Paris, he will present ‘El poder de los Moche’, which explores the astral journeys the Moche, the pre-Columbian civilisation of northern Peru, made through sacred plants.
As Yachay’s co-founder and creative director, he brings all four to contemporary Andean and European collections for international private clients: choosing art pieces, working with the artists and the collectors to find and select every specific art work. He is always building a community in the art world: he knows the artists, their work and their studios, and keeps close relationships with the galleries.
He has done the work behind every decision a curator makes.
Trained as a photographer, he sees how light falls on a wall from morning to evening, and how a work looks in that light, in its colour, its shadow and its place in the room.
Running Galería magazine taught him to build a body of work with a point of view: which artists, in which order, and why.
Across more than a hundred interiors he has worked with proportion, scale and light, the things that decide whether a work belongs in a space.
As a painter he knows what a work demands of the person who made it, and so what it deserves from the person who shows it.
In Spanish, German and English he works directly with artists, collectors and teams, across the Andean and European worlds Yachay curates.
25
YEARS IN ART, PHOTOGRAPHY AND DESIGN
100+
INTERIORS DESIGNED AND COMPLETED
6
CITIES EXHIBITED: LIMA, MADRID, MALLORCA, VENICE, BUENOS AIRES, SEVILLE
Architecture and interiors, photographed for El Comercio and leading architects.
An independent magazine on art, architecture and design.
More than a hundred interiors, with custom furniture and his own photography built in.
Large canvases of geometric abstraction, halftone and ancestral iconography.
Shown in Lima, Madrid, Mallorca, Venice, Buenos Aires and Seville.
He has photographed the room, directed the page, designed the interior and made the work. Now he chooses what comes to live there.