Catherine Tafur is a Peruvian born artist based in New York City.  Tafur spent her childhood in Peru in a bicultural home with a Japanese mother and Peruvian father before relocating to the US. The content of her work is informed by the experience of her youth as a queer, multiracial immigrant in American suburbia. Her drawings and paintings explore themes of death, violence, vulnerability and loss of innocence. Her subjects are political and personal, feminist and confrontational. . She depicts the struggle for a dignified existence in the face of disillusionment with the false American dream, and an unbridled rage against the evils of capitalism and patriarchy.

Below is a reprint of Catherine Tafur interviewed by artist Eric Fischl, for the occasion of the publication of her monograph, Catherine Tafur: Yearning to Breathe Free, Selected Works 2003-20119. (Published by Maus Contemporary) 

Catherine Tafur in conversation with Eric Fischl

Eric Fischl: It may seem silly to single out collage as a starting point in discussing your paintings and drawings when for the viewer it is the visceral response to your work that is at the forefront. But I don’t want to overlook it or take for granted its significance in your artistic toolbox. Whether you are swapping out body parts (as in gender reassignment) or juxtaposing disparate newspaper images of violent power struggles and social injustice, it strikes me that collage is essential to articulating your intimate narratives of deeply felt pain and anger. Can you describe the use of collage in your process of developing the formal presentation as well as the emotional and psychological rupture of your art work?

Catherine Tafur: Collage is instrumental to my process. Existing imagery, especially photography of actual people and events keeps my work anchored in the real world. Digital collage is a tool that allows me to make these disparate connections easily and quickly, in endless versions and combinations. Usually I start with a feeling or an idea, and then search for images, either new ones or images I'd seen before. For example, the painting Revolution (figure 1) began with my ideas about the possibilities of nonviolent revolution during the 2011 Egyptian uprising that sparked the Arab spring. (We all know that quickly devolved into something else.) I was interested in combining western male ideals of heroism with the heroism of the protesters in Tahrir Square. So I searched for images of classical Greek sculpture and action photos of sports figures and collaged them together in Photoshop with images of protesters throwing rocks. In Photoshop I am able to work out compositional designs, move shapes around, figure out negative spaces, etc. to create emotional impact. The dramatic action poses of baseball players, the stately elegance of Greek sculptures, and the anger of the protesters play off each other in a dramatic way when combined with the push and pull and illogical visuals that collage so easily enables, such as multiple light sources, irrational perspectives with shifting vanishing points, etc.

But collage is always a precursor to drawing, which is also critical to the process. I often draw from the collages and make changes, then scan the drawings and re-photoshop, then re-draw, re-collage, etc. It can be quite a long process before I even begin actually painting. The decisions my hand makes of how a line moves while physically dragging pencil on paper, what to leave out and what to exaggerate, as well as the color and light and shade decisions while painting really cement the emotional effect of the work and brings it all together. It was during the drawing and painting processes of making Revolution that the faces of the main figures became monstrous, one lost his feet and the other lost a leg. The colors took on a nostalgic feeling of faded newspaper. Not only does the time it takes to draw and paint allow images to evolve, the materiality of it makes the decision making process of drawing and painting much more instinctual and visceral than in collage and photoshop, which can be a bit more cerebral. All of it is important to me.  (figure 2)

EF: I’m not sure I follow that last thought about the difference between painting (or drawing) and the photo collages. Can you elucidate how painting facilitates a more “instinctual” (your word) and less cerebral process?

CT: What I mean is that during the process of collage, the way I choose the source images and the way I splice them together makes sense in that they are thought out, articulated decisions. I can explain why I chose those images and why I put them together the way I did. But when I draw I cannot tell you why I make a line curve a certain way. While drawing, I follow an impulse as I am dragging the pencil on paper. I am conscious at the moment that I have no rational idea why I’m drawing in this way but know that I’m following some instinct. The decisions are based more on sensory feedback of touch rather than left-brained thought. Does that make sense? 

EF: Completely.

On another more general topic, do you believe that art has the power to change the world? Is that the impetus behind protest art? 

CT: My work is not protest art. I suppose it depends on how you define that term, but I think of protest art as work that supports a social movement for the purpose of helping that movement achieve political change. Although the content of my paintings are political, they don’t have a political goal. The measure of the success of the work is different. The success for protest or activist art is gauged by how convincingly the message comes across, how inspired people are to join/stay/support the movement. I believe that changing the world has to come from mass movements of people, collectively standing up to the institutions that they seek to change or destroy. The art that is a part of these movements is just one of many factors that can help change the world. There are many ways to influence people, and societal change is born from complex multiple circumstances and influencers, artists or not. So it’s not just a simple question of whether art can change the world. I think that’s an unfair burden to place on painting and it encourages hubristic ego in the artist. This is not to diminish the importance of painting and art. It is still one of the most important and powerful experiences of life. Everything else would be pointless without it.

The reason that my work doesn't fit into this category of protest or activist art is that I make paintings that aren’t so clear or sure of their political message. They may appear to be taking a very sure stance at times, but I certainly don't feel that way when I'm making them. They are more open to interpretation and different conclusions. I have made agitprop and designs for social movements, which could be categorized as protest art, and it’s a completely different mindset to make those than my paintings. That work comes from a pure conviction. That purpose is clear. But there is no certainty at all in my paintings, and that is a good thing. The intention is rather to create a meditative space where I (and viewers) can ruminate on whatever political topics the work presents. For example, if you look at the painting Wretched (figure 3), the diptych with a hand pointing a gun on the left panel and the back of Trump's head on the right, the most simplistic and immediate read of this would be that I want to kill to Trump. That is a tiny bit true. I don't actually want to kill him in reality, and it goes against everything I believe in. But the great thing about art is that you can safely explore that space in which such awful thoughts come through. Why do I still have this desire for such malevolence, when it goes against everything I believe in? If my life has taught me anything, it is that political violence is never ok. So if such feelings and malevolent desires still pop up in me, then it makes me believe that anyone is capable of violence if pushed far enough. And that scares the crap out of me. That is the true impetus behind the painting - the need to try to understand that.

EF: I wasn’t really meaning to limit protest art to politics. When I look at your paintings and drawings, I see struggle. I see inequity. I feel torment, pathos, destruction, and chaos. Your material is drawn from a wide range of social, historical, religious, and cultural sources and references so that one would be hard-pressed to assign a particular orthodoxy to your paintings and drawings. But your work, much like the Western religious art you borrow from, portrays profound conflict with internal and external forces--albeit on an existential level.

Could you discuss more specifically about your mash up of classical Greek and Christian art, and Peruvian and pre-Columbian art with natural and man-made disasters? (i.e. Laocoön, Ecstasy of St. Teresa, Disasters of War, Nazca lines, Expulsion from the Garden, Guernica, etc.)

CT: Peru is Catholic, so when I was growing up my first and only early childhood experiences of beauty were attached to Catholicism. Though I’m an atheist, I am still drawn to the beauty of the mystique and suffering in western Christian art, from Masaccio through to the Baroque period. Although I didn’t see reproductions of a lot of this work until I moved to the US, I recognized the familiarity of that Christian aesthetic. In addition to just being incredible art, I'm also fascinated by the overt sexuality in so much of the work. For example, the image of Saint Sebastian is more than just Christian suffering. It's a major gay icon. It's a perfect mix of homoeroticism and pain, shame and desire, of sexual melancholy and androgynous masculinity. Christianity has been so particularly cruel to queer people, it's fascinating to me that its homoeroticism is mixed with punishment, a perfect rendition of the suffering queer body. Although this is an icon for gay men, I like to expand it to other queer representations. I want to make a lesbian Saint Sebastian, or a genderqueer Saint Sebastian, or one that shows the struggle and beauty of female masculinity. You are absolutely right about the conflict of internal and external forces in the works. (figure 4)

The pre-Columbian art is all about Peru. The Nazca lines and the Tumi are symbols of Peru. These are images you see everywhere there. I use these in the painting 'El Sendero Luminoso.' During the 80s and into the early 90s, Peru was terrorized by a communist-Maoist-guerrilla-insurgency group called the Communist Party of Peru – Shining Path, or in Spanish, ‘Sendero Luminoso.’ They began an armed struggle against the State, killing tens of thousands of innocent people, ravaged the countryside in the sierra and made their way to the coastal capital, Lima, where my family lived. I grew up with constant blackouts (because the Senderistas would target and dynamite the electrical towers) and bombs that shook our house, waking me at night, as I screamed for my mom. My childhood mind had no knowledge or understanding of what was really going on in Peru, so all I knew was that Sendero were communists and communists were monsters because they bombed and killed people. Imagine my shock when I first read the communist manifesto as a teenager in the U.S. and found that this wasn't necessarily the case. My memories of Sendero's bombs and my childhood fear of communism are the seeds that led to my interests in political systems. My experience of moving to American suburbia was confusing because I was very safe, but miserable. Being a lesbian immigrant in the late 80s and early 90s in suburbia was awful. I also was slowly learning about the malevolence and violence of capitalism. I'm now anti-capitalist as I'm sure is obvious with paintings such as Rana Plaza in Savar: Death of a Thousand Workers (figure 5) and Figures at the Base of Trump Tower (figure 6), but my art, which is anti-violence and anti-oppression, is more defined by what I'm against than what I'm for.

Sometimes when I borrow from artists it's because I have such admiration for them. Goya's etchings 'The Disasters of War' are masterpieces depicting the suffering caused by political violence. Picasso's Guernica is the ultimate political painting whose shadow is perpetually cast onto my studio. Nobody can paint hell like Bosch, render such warm tender masculinity like Michelangelo or depict a more desperate body in struggle like Laocoön. (figure 7) 

EF: Your paintings, especially the multi-figured ones, have both an immediate visual impact and a much slower “read-out” where the images resonate, beg to be analyzed, and are eventually grasped in very much the way that our dreams affect our waking minds. 

Your 2011 painting, The Last Fish (figure 8), is a perfect example of this. Compositionally speaking, its graphic power comes from a bottom right to top left diagonal thrust that intersects a contained circular arena. The intertwined bodies that make up the diagonal movement are like a rushing water source. The density and speed of this cascading motion is met with a log-jam like resistance that sends the motion back towards the center of this arena. This conflicting flow creates an eddy or whirlpool of centrifugal force that swirls around and engulfs the image of the fish, which I presume is the fish referred to in the title. The wispy delicate cherry blossoms in the upper right corner complement the powerfully unstoppable flow and swirl with their wafting snow-like descent. At the bottom middle is a young girl standing/staring at you, the viewer. She is the only self-consciously aware person/being and the one through which you enter the chaos behind her.

The formal construction of this work contains and propels the imagery but does not entirely reveal the painting's “meaning.” I am curious about the use and symbolism of your animal beings, headless adults, and innocent children that surround the gasping/screaming/dying fish. Could you unpack this for us?  

CT: That is an exquisite formal analysis of my painting. Yes, motion was definitely the guiding factor for the design of this composition. And the way you describe the immediate visual impact followed by the slower read-out is exactly what I aim for: a composition that will stop you from walking past it but also keep you there longer to ponder its meaning. Your statement about dreams is interesting because at times my process involves subconscious impulses and intrusive thoughts manifesting into consciousness as visual form. I suppose there's a bit of surrealism in everything I do. 

I made this painting when I was focusing on a body of work that was an inward facing exploration of my lesbian sexuality, fluid gender identity, and struggles with internalized homophobia that had infected my mind when I was young. I wanted to make a grand finale of this work before moving on to subjects that were more outward looking (e.g. humanitarian disasters resulting from global capitalism, etc.) This was meant to be the last painting to deal purely with the workings of my inner mind. (Of course, one can never fully get away from this kind of thing, but I tried.) The fish represents Christianity, and by extension all forms of false consciousness and internalized social oppressions. I wanted to kill this fish in my head, and make room for a rebirth of something new. Baptismal fonts are always octagons, the visual representation of rebirth. I made the setting for this act be the UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship) Octagon. My brother was training in MMA fighting (multiple martial arts) at the time and it fascinated me that the caged ring for UFC fights is a blue octagon. It seemed appropriate that the scene for this ritualistic killing and possible rebirth would be a site of modern brutal battles of individuals. The young girl at the front, looking at the viewer, is the main protagonist. She is wiping her mouth as if she just vomited in shame or disgust. The whole scene grows out of her head. The animal beings represent repressed sexuality as untamed savagery. Some figures are headless because they are unthinking. They have no arms because they don't do anything. They are followers of their faith/fish and are useless beings. The children represent innocence, which is the true nature of untainted sexuality. Childhood is also the time when sexuality begins to manifest for many people, as it did for me. Machu Picchu in the background represents Peru, the cherry blossoms represent Japan, and the half bald eagle figures are Americans. In the far background is a crowd filled arena with bright stadium lighting that add to the sense of spectacle of the event. The red and purple figures on the upper left were taken from Michelangelo's Last Judgement wall, a nod to his mix of homoeroticism and condemnation.

EF: I’d like to hear more about your uses of Cyclopes. There are many Greek and Roman mythological narratives that represent these creatures in varying ways, and their depiction throughout Greek, Roman, and Western art attests to their interpretive elasticity. Can you tell me how you came to use cyclopes and what they signify for you?  

As a follow up question, you also use images of people with no eyes and no facial features other than their open, screaming mouth. I am curious what those characters represent? They are like a mouth-cyclopes.

CT: There is so much mythic weight to the image of the cyclops as a monster or a giant. I like the association with freakishness, but for me the image of having only one singular eye is about hyper focus and myopia. My cyclopes have one eye because they can’t see more than one thing , one perspective. Let’s look at the painting The Assassination of Osama bin Laden (figure 9). The piece is based on the widely circulated White House photo of the situation room during the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. I kept the two most familiar and recognizable figures - Hillary Clinton and Barrack Obama. Obama is preceded by 3 brightly colored male figures leading him like a horse-drawn carriage. They are the gods of capitalism. They are not blind so they have eyes, but they choose not to see so their eyes are closed. On the upper right are two children with Masaccio’s Expulsion From The Garden leaving the scene behind them. This symbolizes America’s loss of innocence.  

Then there are the 3 Cyclopes. The first is the tank-like military man rising behind the lavender twin towers that he uses as his guide and shield. His one eye sees pure vengeful force and nothing else. He is unburdened by the figure of death hovering over his shoulder. Then there’s the Phillip Guston cyclops on the bottom right. This one has no mouth, nose, ears, face, or body. That is because it helplessly does nothing but watch. It is a useless zombie incapable of action, a symbol of the laziness and apathy of Americans. Finally, there is the screaming cyclops, half naked and pointing (with Michelangelo’s arm of God creating Adam) to the carnage you know is happening off screen. This is the consciousness of the painting. This figure’s eye can clearly see the moral insanity of what is happening: the planned killing of a man.

Usually I leave out body parts that characters don’t use. For example, in Open Arms the figure has no mouth because she has been silenced. The piece is about the silencing of women, sexual assault, and feminist rage. Sometimes I’ll exaggerate a body part as well, like with the open screaming mouth. I love the term mouth-cyclops. Can I steal it? One of these mouth-cyclopes is very prominent in the piece Drone War (figure 10). This painting is about Obama’s drone strikes in tribal Pakistan. There weren’t many images of drone carnage to work from, so most of this is made up. The mouth-cyclops is pure rage and suffering. It has no eyes, nose, or ears because in its cathartic scream it can only project outward and cannot take anything in. The trauma it has endured has forced this being into a state of suffering so extreme that it has closed itself off to all else. In Drone Wareverything emanates from this scream. Even the concentric circles of the drone targeting system are like sound waves reverberating from that howling mouth. A big influence for this was, of course, Francis Bacon’s Three Studies for the Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion.

EF: You’ve described in words and imagery the mad, destructive, dehumanizing aggression of power, but you haven’t discussed how color informs your work. Beginning around 2011, you introduced into your paintings a more abstract composition of high-keyed colored shapes that remind me of game boards. This use of color creates a tension between the playful and the horrific, resulting in a powerful and ironic viewing experience. Can you tell me more about how you think about color? 

CT: How interesting – I’ve never heard it compared to game boards before. That could add whole new sets of meanings – strategy, play, competition, childhood, etc. I wonder if that makes sense with the subject of political violence. Ultimately we are all simply wounded children trying to get through this board we can’t see with a set of rules we don’t understand.  

Yes, my color did change around 2011, with a simultaneous shift in the content of the work from an inward looking angst to an outward facing confrontation. I had been struggling with depression for a very long time and it was around then that I started getting better, and thus more willing to face what was happening in the world rather than ruminating over the dark recesses of my own mind. It turns out the outside world is more colorful than the inside of my brain.  The dark muted tones and carefully modeled forms were appropriate for that earlier work, but I found the world of global oppressions and violence to be loud and chaotic. It needed louder color. I don’t really think of it as playful because that implies happiness, and I’m simply more interested in loudness. I like how such contrasting colors can really catch your eye and create shock and depth at the same time.

Sometimes my color choices are driven by specific content, such as in Revolution, where I used the color and shapes of old Russian constructivist posters. Figures at the Base of Trump Tower (figure 6) is covered in gold not only because of Trump's obsession with it but because it’s obviously the color of greed and capitalism. Rana Plaza in Savar (figure 5) is made up completely of areas of flat bright color to reference the color of advertising. In Drone War color creates a sense of heat, and color vibrations move the eye around in a circular pattern.

EF: Would you agree that there is an inherent duality, a paradox if you will, in paintings or drawings which depict the darkest or harshest emotions? Is it the unique quality of art that it has the ability to hold in perfect balance a horror that is beautifully articulated?  Is this the nature of art?  

CT: Do you view this duality as a contradiction between the beauty of form versus the psychological content? Do you mean that the beauty of the language of painting, i.e. mark-making, color, etc., is abstract enough that one gets lost in it in a way that escapes the emotions that painting language is trying to depict? This reminds me of the scene of the dog owner that points to something for the dog but the dog only looks at the owner’s hand, rather than the thing the owner is pointing to. I suppose here that painting is the pointing hand while content is the thing being pointed to. The question is whether the emotions depicted can be experienced aesthetically, or if aesthetics negate other types of responses or experiences or renders them somehow lesser.

I don’t think that beauty has to be at odds with other emotions or reactions. Why would depiction and beauty cancel each other out? Why not coexist, or enhance each other? Can you further explain this paradox for me?

EF: I’d like to approach the question of the paradox from a slightly different angle.

I’d like to ask you about your drawings, which I think are exceptional. There is a slow, stroking pleasure, a delicately detailed touch if you will, a masterfully controlled rendering to even the harshest and most viscerally disturbing images. Of all your work, I think your drawings come closest to capturing what is explicit in the historical influences you have cited throughout this book (Laocoön, St. Sebastian, etc.): beauty and horror.  

Would you agree that not only is there an embrace of the aesthetics of Classicism within the rendering of the human form, but there is also an embrace of a classical acceptance of the “human condition”? Life is sin, crime, pain, torment; it is rarely just, frequently unjust. Which is to say that in your view, life is essentially tragic.  

CT: I am not an essentialist, so I don’t believe humanity is wired to be sinful or evil but also not good or just. I think life has been tragic for most but not others. I wouldn't want to make a blanket statement saying life is tragic or not because there is no one kind of life. So much depends on where you are in all the multiple hierarchical power structures in the world. I don't think life is essentially any one thing. Although I've had my difficulties, my life is quite privileged compared to most. But I do hate that there is so much needless suffering, and I can’t take my eyes off it. I don't understand the cruelty behind it and my search for that understanding is part of why so much of my art is about injustice.

Your question seems to presuppose an attachment of beauty to virtue and life, and therefore opposed to horror and death. But beauty does not belong only to the positive associations with life, pleasure, and goodness. Beauty is a part of everything, including death, destruction, and cruelty. Beauty and horror are not diametrically opposed. Perhaps it’s some extension of the Freudian death drive, but I think horror and malevolence have always had an aesthetic allure apart from morality. Maybe this view comes from my early Catholic memories of the beautiful church that turned out to be so destructive.

To circle all the way back around, this reminds me of subjects of my childhood fear, El Sendero Luminoso. I didn’t know it then, but the group was a beautiful death cult. They incorporated literature, art, and music into their way of life. Violence was a virtue for them, and they made it beautiful for themselves. Their leader, Abimael Guzman, incorporated Shakespeare and the Gospel into his writings and speeches. The prisons where Senderistas were kept apart from other inmates were covered in murals espousing the virtues of their people's war. They sang songs and spoke in grandiose metaphors while championing violence and war. They used beauty and art to convince themselves to kill, and to value killing and embrace death. They killed tens of thousands of people and terrified many more. Beauty can be horror.

EF: You have drawn throughout your career but in the last couple of years you seem to have focused primarily on drawings. Can you explain why that might be?

CT: On November 1, 2016, my father died after a harsh battle with cancer. Seven days later, Donald Trump was elected president of the United States. My world was suddenly very different. I stopped painting and all I could do was draw. I really couldn't handle the long process and 'big thinking' associated with the way I make paintings. I needed to keep things small, intimate, and basic. The immediacy of drawing, and the fact that I could make them at home, helped me in the aftermath of that. This is why I focused on drawings.

It has been so difficult to face the fact that in my newly fatherless life, this racist pathetic man is leader of the world. I spent so many hours staring at Trump's disgusting face, rendering every inch of it, contemplating his depravity, hubris, and greed with every line I made. It's as if every mark was asking why. Why is this the way things are now? My dad was a very loving and humble man, a Latin American immigrant who escaped poverty and dedicated his life to his family and to science. Donald Trump is an immigrant-hating, narcissistic, anti-science, cruel dictator wannabe. Donald Trump is my anti-father. Maybe my controlled way of drawing helped with my out of control anger. Maybe beauty for me is simply a tool that helps me slow down and focus on these difficult things, a mechanism that enables me to face the incomprehensible.

Eric Fischl is an internationally acclaimed American painter and sculptor whose career achievements make him one of the most influential figurative painters of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.  His work has been shown in major institutions such as The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Musée Beaubourg, Paris; the Albertina, Vienna; the Kestnergesellschaft, Hannover;the Stadtkirche Darmstadt, Germany; and many other collections throughout the world. Fischl’s work has been featured in over a thousand publications. 

Eric Fischl is a Fellow at both the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Science. He lives and works in Sag Harbor, New York, with his wife, the painter April Gornik.