Christian Curiel is being hazed
but has not crossed the line
By Alex (Vice Staff) – October 23, 2009I don’t know much about contemporary painting but when I discovered the work of Brooklyn-based painter Christian Curiel, who draws lots of cute suffering children, I felt like asking him a few questions about his own childhood.
Vice: Hi Christian, where are you from?
Christian Curiel: My family is from Cuba but I was born in Puerto Rico.
Explain? In the 70s my father was offered a job to work as a mechanic on boats so he took the opportunity to move all the family away from Cuba. That’s how I was born, I was a happy accident. My mother had me at a very old age, like at the last minute. She was 45, almost 80 now, so I grew up with lots of older people. My brother could be my father.
So you were a spoiled baby? Maybe, yeah.
Have you ever been to Cuba? Yes, I’ve been there twice and I hope to go again soon.
How did your parents talk about Cuba before you went there? Oh, they were very nostalgic about the old days before the revolution. They have very nice stories about humble, peasant families. There is a lot of folklore, a lot of stories.
Tell me one.
There is one that says that when you have dreams about animals, each animal represents a number. I don’t know which ones exactly, but if you dreamt of a cow and a chicken, the next day you go play the lottery and depending on the animals you play the numbers they represent. Those kinds of things stick with me in terms of symbolism and tend to affect my work.
What did you think of Cuba? I was excited to go and I felt sort of like at home but it’s also very depressing and very sad because they have nothing, basically. When I went there I left everything, even my underwear, because they don’t have those things. There are shops where you can buy things with American dollars but it’s almost impossible to get American dollars by legal means so it’s like this constant teasing. But there is a form of happiness, celebrating the small things. Growing up poor you have to be more inventive, even in your play–you have to play with old tires and wooden sticks. It makes you more creative. So it sort of opened my eyes.
How old were you when you arrived in the States? Probably five or six. I moved to New Jersey for about a year or two in a place called Paterson, also lots of great memories there, like when I discovered the snow. Trying to learn English was funny, because I didn’t know how to communicate, it took a long time for me to adjust.
Were you drawing as a child? Growing up in Puerto Rico my dad wasn’t so much around. He met someone and had a child and my mum was not at the happiest state then so she kind of let me do what I wanted to. I remember being allowed to draw on the walls of my bedroom. I think I always did stuff with my hands–I come from a very crafty family.
And how did you become a painter? I remember watching one of my teachers draw an imaginary landscape in like 20 seconds and I was like, “Wow!” I could imagine myself doing this for a very long time and ever since then I don’t remember a time when I was not making things. When I was in school I was always the one chosen to draw the cats for Halloween or Santa Claus to decorate the classroom. I picked up a brush and fell in love with it.
Is that why you draw mostly children in your paintings? I think there is something about trying to remember what it was to be a child. I’m interested in the negative space of memory, in dreams, in the things that are not quite concrete, since we all have to go through that. We all have to grow up at some point. I feel like I had very beautiful bright moments as a child but also kind of tragic memories.
Out of curiosity, I found guilt. Back in Puerto Rico we had chickens and ducks and different animals in the backyard. Like I said before my mom was kind of absent-minded, which allowed me to investigate and play. We had a little family of ducks and a bunch of baby ducks and I was very curious to discover what would happen if I stepped on a duck head. And I don’t know what possessed me but I remember just doing it, I don’t why I did it. After it happened, I saw the duck dying, I felt really bad, he was still moving. It was traumatic. That’s why I want my paintings to be a work about childhood, I could make work about that kind of feelings forever, like the moment where you discover your sexuality, you discover that you’re growing up. All those moments out of curiosity are interesting to me as a place to make art.
Is that why we feel a sense of innocence and cruelty in the same time in your drawings?
Sure. A lot of times I think about the novel
Lord of The Flies, where those kids are on an island and they have to find a way to create a society, a hierarchy. I became very interested in that question: what would happen if there were no authority figures? There are also times when my figures are not female or male.
What are they?
I don’t know, I don’t have a word for them.
They are not sexually defined?
Yeah, they haven’t figured it out yet. A lot of times I feel my work is kind of magic realist, but within that surface there are more serious things happening.
Tell me about that painting you made called “In Hazing.” Hazing is that process that is mostly known for its negative connotations in recent years. In college and in the military people are placed through very regressive situations, sexually degrading and demoralizing, and unless you do it, you’re not part of the group, you’re not a brother, you’re not a sister. But as I started researching I discovered that hazing was also a coming of age in many tribal rituals throughout the world, where a boy needs to become a man and has to endure very painful situations.
Have you been hazed yourself? No, but I feel like I’m being hazed right now.
By this interview? No, just by the harsh things of the world, people passing away and dying and having to learn from that to grow from those very painful experiences. We are in a constant form of being hazed even though we don’t want to recognize it. This last series began after a very close friend of mine committed suicide a couple of years ago. It just got me to think of the inner struggles that we all face and how we all deal with them in different ways. For whatever reason he thought that his way was to end his life. And that was very hard for me to accept.
After that I created that painting “In Hazing,” which is a group of children following each other. They don’t have mouths. That came out of making a mistake in the painting and I erased the mouth and I sort of left it like it and the more I think about it the more I feel like leaving it erased, because it sort of symbolizes our difficulty to communicate well. For instance, it is hard to put into words things that I’m thinking about.
The places and time of the scenes you draw are not really specific, are they? Totally, it could be anywhere and anytime. A lot of the times the outfits that the characters wear could from the 20s or from the 70s.
And it could be in New Jersey or Puerto Rico. Yes, it’s the same for the backgrounds. I see them as psychological landscapes. It’s another weird peculiar thing that I never paint interiors. They often take place outside.
It always happen in nature, but with human traces.
What do the tires in your paintings mean? My father died when I was sixteen years old, at the time where you discover a lot of things about yourself, about becoming a man. I thought that I had to grow up very quickly to help stabilize my mother–it was a very traumatic moment. This idea of painting childhood is a way of trying to relive something that I lost, to remember the innocent times. The wheel becomes a symbol in a way because my father was a mechanic, so it is a very tongue-in-cheek symbol to me. But that creates a very interesting image for the people to view and try to imagine what it means to them. The symbols that I chose are personal, giving something banal a power, and now you’re able to ask yourself, “What does it mean? Why is it there?”
While we’re talking about symbols, there is this recurrent pink blob in many of your paintings. That was from the series I created after my friend passed away, this pink blob became our struggle, you know the thing that you feel in your stomach, very visceral, kind of ugly. The struggle itself was probably what killed him. He didn’t know what to do with it so it swallowed him. That pink kind visceral blob stands for our struggle: deal with it, play with it, fight with it.
There is a frustration looking at your paintings. I wish they were more violent but it never really is. You never cross the line. I think I reached the end of something and am at the beginning of something else. I think it’s gonna take me a while to let go of these things, because it’s scary. I feel that’s where I’m heading. I don’t know if it’s gonna be more violent there or maybe less metaphorical, but yes, I feel like I’m stopping too soon and that drives me crazy in the studio. It’s a scary thing, man, I’m gonna try. I hope I’ll be able to let go, it’s just something that I have to do. You know how Goya went crazy? I hope I will be able to express that violence without turning crazy.
