Fefe Villarruel
Visual Artist

Fefe Villarruel was born in Mexico City in December 2000. She began her artistic training at the age of four, when her grandmother noticed her interest in the visual arts and enrolled her in painting classes at the Casa de Cultura Raúl Anguiano. Since then, she has developed a profound love for art, which she continued to cultivate throughout her education at the Taller de Arte Coyoacán.

She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Visual Arts from the Facultad de Artes Visuales at the Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León. She completed the Digital Strategies and Social Media course (Summer 2025) at the Istituto Europeo di Design (IED) in Madrid and recently finished a Diploma in Cultural Management at Tecnológico de Monterrey. She works as a cultural manager, with experience in both public and private sector galleries.

Fefe’s work stems from an obsession: highlighting the aesthetic that often goes unnoticed. She is interested in taking the everyday out of its context — that which we ignore simply because it is ordinary — and putting it front and center. A “look at me, damn it” approach.

In her practice, Mexico City is not idealized; it is observed. She captures it as a saturated, overflowing, kitsch universe, where popular graphics, street signs, corner tacos, and clashing colors coexist without asking permission. She is drawn to what is visible but rarely admired, to what holds aesthetic value without being “sophisticated.”

Illustration is her primary language, exploring urban spaces and street culture through tenderness, nostalgia, chaos, and resistance — resistance to visual homogenization, disguised classism, and anyone trying to play the system.

Color is essential in her work: she uses it as both an emotional and symbolic tool. She breaks the rules of chromatic realism in everyday life: skies can be green, floors pink, multiple eyes and two mouths allow continuous observation and dialogue. Everything is valid as long as it conveys that rare, emotional beauty.

Her strokes are inspired by spontaneity, by crayons and “misused” colored pencils. She values the imperfection these materials breathe into her work. Though she was taught to color “in one direction,” she never understood why. In her practice, she lets her hand flow freely, allowing lines to go where they want, letting the drawing breathe with liberty.

For Fefe, illustration is a way to document the emotional side of the visual — the feeling of seeing something perfectly disordered. That feeling, which words cannot express but lines can, is what she strives to capture.

She has participated in various projects, including:

She also teaches workshops for beginners, such as her coffee painting workshop, where she shares accessible techniques and encourages playful, experimental artistic expression.