Chilean artist Catatte Tapia translates cult cinema frame by frame into coloured ballpoint pen, turning the speed of film into something that demands hours of meticulous, layered work and invites the viewer to get close.
Cinema moves at 24 frames per second. Catatte Tapia works at a rather different pace. Her Stills series takes images from cult films, among them The Exorcist, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Midsommar, In the Mood for Love and Machuca, and renders them in coloured ballpoint pen with a precision that the speed of their source material makes no provision for. That deliberate mismatch is part of what the series is about.
The ballpoint pen is not a natural art material. It is designed for other uses, associated with the quick and the disposable. Tapia’s practice runs against all of that: the same tool used for a hurried signature is applied here in layered glazes and superimposed textures that begin to behave like pigment and paint, addressing pictorial problems through a material that has no business solving them. The strangeness and dramatic violence of the films she draws from contrasts with the delicacy of the translation: something jarring rendered with meticulous tenderness.
The drawings are small in format, which is a considered choice.
“My drawings, from their small format, invite you to shorten the distance and approach physically and reflectively,” Tapia says, “to delve into the intersection of strokes where a material is continuously masked and unmasked, and into the intersection of contradictions that open an ambiguous space, straining the limits of the technical and the sensitive.”
The instruction to get physically close is also an invitation to look at what a ballpoint pen can actually do when given hours of accumulated attention: the layering that produces depth, the way colour builds through repetition, the marks that hold the still frame in time.
The series sits within a broader practice structured around archiving, collecting and rescuing images linked to memory and pop culture. In bringing cinema back to the hand, to small format and slow attention, Tapia both revalues the photographic and compositional power of film and places it in a very different kind of time.
Catatte Tapia is an artist from La Calera, Chile, holding a degree in Art from the Pontifical Catholic University of Valparaíso. Her practice addresses collective memory through meticulous and repetitive processes, working with oil paint and coloured ballpoint pens.
ARTIST LINKS
@catatte
Stills, coloured ballpoint pen drawings. Films depicted: The Exorcist, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Midsommar, In the Mood for Love, Machuca. All works by Catatte Tapia.
