Catatte Tapia is a Chile-based visual artist who uses colored ballpoint pens to bring scenes from pulp films to life, exploring themes of the unsettling and the dramatic, as well as the blatant contrast between the delicate and the violent.
At first glance, one is struck by the tremendous amount of work that goes into a single piece. Characterized by meticulous detail, precision, and millions of drawn lines, Tapia’s pieces are not only visually compelling but also sharp, tangible proof of assiduous consistency—a testament to her dedication and her drive to fuse artistic skill with a passion for pop culture and cinematic stills.
“I use colored ballpoint pens to explore certain oppositions,” Tapia explains. “On the one hand, an everyday material, designed for other uses, is transformed into an artwork and, despite its proximity to graphic art, also addresses pictorial problems: the superimposition of textures and glazes becomes, at some point, a mixture of pigments and colors.”
Tapia’s work is nostalgic on a personal and collective level. By using ballpens, she channels a very familiar tool of expression from our childhood. By recreating the scenes from the movies, she connects her work to shared cultural heritage.
She chooses mostly horror, drama, noir, and action movies, making them less intimidating yet preserving the unsettling undertones. Through her artistic translation to a commonly accessible medium, Tapia reclaims pop culture’s visual language and recycles it to serve as fine art. She gives it a second life outside of popcorn-smelling cinemas and everyday living rooms; she converts it into art exhibition pieces.
It is a depiction of a pure power of creativity and artistic expression. There is no single outlet for any given idea. The image can be a painting, a live scene, or a film frame, and within every iteration, it can have a different impact and it can even shift meanings.
Read our “Aberration” issue in full
The 31 artists featured in RAWGUE. Magazine’s 5th issue stray from the expected, taking untrodden paths, contemplating imperfection, solitude in its many forms, and the ongoing process of self-acceptance. Through shifting perspectives, their works explore what it means to look at oneself from the outside, as if through broken glass.
We’re a team of writers using our craft to spotlight art in its most honest form. RAWGUE. started as a bi-monthly editorial experiment where each issue’s theme is dictated by the submitted work, thus removing editorial bias from the equation and preserving a more raw approach. We focus on all forms of poetry: written, photographed, painted, drawn, and filmed.
