Rafael Lanfranco

Rafa Lanfranco is a Peruvian visual artist, sculptor and writer whose work explores the meeting point of ancestral memory, popular culture and the imagination of the present. His practice starts from a recurring question: what happens when the symbols of the past keep evolving?

Through sculpture, painting, ceramics, drawing, 3D printing and storytelling, Lanfranco reinterprets forms drawn from pre-Columbian and Peruvian folk art to build contemporary characters, objects and mythologies. In his work, Andean and Amazonian references live side by side with science fiction, video games, anime, toys, comics and global pop culture.

Out of this research came the WAKOverse, an ever-expanding artistic universe inhabited by the WAKOs: beings originally inspired by the pre-Columbian ceramic tradition that evolve, mutate and take on new identities. Rather than reproducing the past, Lanfranco uses it as raw material to imagine possible futures and to explore ideas such as identity, transformation, anxiety, memory and cultural syncretism.

His work has been shown internationally in cities such as Milan, Washington D.C., Seoul, Tokyo, Singapore and Lima. In 2023 he was a finalist for the RO Plastic Prize, an initiative linked to the Rossana Orlandi gallery in Milan, and he has since kept developing projects that bring together art, design, storytelling and popular culture.

Alongside his visual work, Lanfranco builds narrative universes. He is the author of El Imaquinario de Yute y Tocuyo (Planeta, 2022), El Peruano Habla en Comida (2025) and Yute y Tocuyo: El Gran Salto a las Nubes (Santillana, 2026). This narrative dimension runs through his visual work as well: every character can be part of a larger story, and every object can work as a fragment of a world.

Lanfranco was a Fulbright Scholar and earned a master's degree in Communication at Boston University. He lives and works mainly in Lima, with a steady connection to Milan and to international art and design circuits.