Approaching the American Southwest through a new lens of realism, the American painter considers his family history and national myth through memory-inflected paintings
Caleb Hahne Quintana – Existing Between Two Names
I’ll start with my last name. My first last name is Hahne, the other being Quintana. My biological father’s name is Hahne. I had privately used Quintana for years before using it for exhibitions. A big part of that decision was my fear of erasure. My family has a history, and I feared that as time passed, Quintana would disappear. I felt obligated, in a revivalist sense, with respect to Chicano revivalism, to bring my family, our history, and that last name into my work. I always felt a bit more “Quintana.” My parents were never married, so I grew up between two houses. I spent little time with my dad and always felt bizarre about having this last name that tied me to a family from which I felt removed.
Autobiography in Caleb Hahne Quintana’s Work
Stories are what give purpose to a lot of people. It’s how we relate to the world and to other people. I’ve always been able to understand my feelings and experiences best through stories. It’s almost as if you have this nebulous thing inside of you, and then you read something, and then you find language for an inexplicable feeling for the first time. I try to do that in my paintings. I don’t think that between painting and language, one is more significant than the other; I think that they both must exist in harmony.
The Relationship Between Image and Language for Caleb Hahne Quintana
I’ve always been a bit better with the image than with the word. When I do title work, I’m considerate of every composing element. The autobiographical part of it – whether it be paintings of my ancestors or people I know personally. Everybody has a version of these people in their lives – that’s the relatability of it. Whether you know the identity – sometimes I do give the identity of the person right away in the painting – there is almost like this non-person in some of them. Yet I don’t consider myself a figure painter in any way. I consider myself just like a painter, and figure, land, and color all exist harmoniously.
The Essential Qualities of Contemporary Painting, Considering Medium Specificity
When you look at my paintings, color is a key component. Arriving at a color or a palette in a painting is something that is responsive. I’ve never been able to find that experience in photo, video, performance, or sculpture. Whenever I think about making a video or taking a photograph, I am struck by the thought that every image already exists. So instead, I feel like I need to paint it using the means specific to painting: a four-inch brush with a color I mixed. It feels like the best vehicle for that thought experience, feeling, or whatever it may be.
Descriptive and Poetic, Caleb Hahne Quintana’s Naming Conventions
The painting always comes first and then the name. I think galleries get exhausted sending me emails for titles because I don’t immediately name things. It takes me a week or two weeks to title a piece. A lot of it is birthed out of writing. “I Am the Salt of Two Seas” (a work from 2022) is completely about my genetic build: my mother being Latina, and my dad being German, and somewhere in the middle, my body met at these two oceans.
That idea came to me when I was swimming in Italy, my first time ever over the ocean. We were swimming in the Mediterranean Sea, and it was fascinating to me that I could be in this body of water and on the other side was where I lived and where I’m from. “I Am the Salt of Two Seas” felt like a poetic descriptor for how I thought about the salt of our body, the water of our body, and the convergence of these two identities. Even the title of my recent painting at FLAG, “How a Fall Can Make You Real,” was about coming into the body.
Embodiment and Pain as Manifest in Caleb Hahne Quintana’s Work
I think oftentimes we treat pain as the only time we experience ourselves embodied. It’s the only time we come into our bodies, we come into our feelings, we come into our trauma, we come into all of these things. And it’s all through suffering. When you’ve bitten your lip and have a cut healing, every meal you eat makes you feel as if you can’t remember what it felt like to eat without a sore.
Then, all of a sudden, you think, “I will never take for granted the way that salt didn’t burn my mouth.” I think I wanted to make a painting about loss because victory felt too easy. I think that there’s just more poetry in painting at times. None of these have titles yet [Caleb gestures towards a grouping of unfinished work in his studio]. I have to wait for them to be finished; I have to spend time with them first.
Genealogical Research in Caleb Hahne Quintana’s Work
The way I got into this was accidental and because of my sister. She had taken a DNA test for school, and it came back that she was something like 67% indigenous. My whole life up to that point [Caleb was 26 at the time], my family had never said that they were Mexican, instead claiming Spanish heritage. This always confused me because nothing my family did was Spanish. We ate Menudo. We had mariachi bands at every family function.
The dialect we spoke, the color of our skin, our very facial structure was simply not Spanish. This led my mom to also take one, and all of the indigenous DNA kept showing up. We got on ancestry.com and I started building our family tree. Everything kept coming back to Mexico. It made sense because Mexican people are the product of indigenous and Spanish blood. I struggle with saying indigenous because I am not in any capacity other than being Mexican and Chicano.
Reflecting on Family History and Genealogy
I started talking to my family more about our history. There’s a whole generation after my grandmother that doesn’t speak Spanish and thinks of themselves as White, American, and maybe Spanish. A big part of that is assimilation. I made a whole painting about this, but I was on the phone with my grandmother, and she said that when they first got to Berthoud, Colorado, they were the only Mexican family, the only Brown family in town.
And on the sign when you entered Berthoud, Colorado, it said, “No browns, no blacks”: it was a white-only town. This is my speculation, but out of my family’s safety, I believe that it has always been safer and easier for them to be European––this narrative of being Spanish was born out of protection. This is another reason why I chose to reclaim the name Quintana.
But I’m not outwardly claiming my work as Latino or Mexican. My family just has an amazing story that I don’t want to be erased out of fear. When my grandmother told me the Pancho Villa story [one of Caleb’s ancestors rode with Pancho Villa], I was like, “How come you never said anything? How come you never told me?” And she said, “Well, nobody’s ever asked.”
That felt like a prompt to me to start asking the right questions. So, the research element of my work was born out of my sister doing a DNA test and my grandmother coming forward with more stories. It has forced my family into these uncomfortable conversations because I’m asking them to reach out to people they haven’t talked to in years. I just don’t want any of those connections to disappear.
The Legal System’s Contradictions with Family History
On top of their need to forget and assimilate, another difficult factor is the nonexistence of my family’s records because of illegal immigration. This adds another level of complicated research. Because when I type in my grandma, my great-great-grandfather’s name, and “Berthoud, Colorado”, you can’t find them. And still, I have these photos of him. I have these photos of my grandmother in front of the school.
The research in my work is fun and challenging. I always wonder whenever I make a painting about it, “am I doing enough? Is this right? Is this the right way to tell the story?” Because essentially, I’m trying to tell a story for people who are no longer here and of whom no photos exist.
Caleb Hahne Quintana’s Family’s Reaction to His Work and Research
My grandmother is proud, which has been amazing. It was much harder to be proud to be Latino and Mexican in the ’40s, in a place that declared that no brown people were welcome. I don’t think my mother cares as deeply as I do, which is totally fine. I don’t think she entirely gets it, to be quite honest. I think she’s supportive and appreciates what I’m doing. My stepdad, who’s been in my life all along, has been proud of my ability to tell this story. Growing up looking how I look, people always challenged my identity as Latino. And I always felt like a circus act for people. The politics of identity have become broader and more understood, and I haven’t been confronted with questions of who I am and my identity in the past five years.
I still feel the self-imposed pressures of questioning my positionality and ownership of this story. I’m also abundantly aware of my position as a white, Latino person in America. I don’t experience the same things that my sister does as a brown woman, I will never speak for her story. I’m always looking for ways in which I can participate or engage in my own family’s experience, which I think is like, again, my reality and also my purpose.
Optimism in Americana through Caleb Hahne Quintana’s Eyes
I’ve heard “optimistic” and “hopeful” used to describe my work often lately, more than I’ve ever heard in my life. It’s funny, because if you ask most people in my life, they wouldn’t say I’m an optimist or a pessimist. I think I’m a realist in that I exist between these two fulcrums.
I said earlier that I didn’t want to make a painting about triumph, but a lot of the paintings in which I am painting my family members are from this place of victory. My relationship to Colorado is essential to this, but actually didn’t come into my work until I moved to New York. I used to want to be from anywhere but Colorado.
Caleb Hahne Quintana’s Relationship to Colorado
I think that much of the Southwest, particularly where I’m originally from, Aurora, Colorado, resides in between rural and suburban. It’s boring, but there is also a lot of violence in a way that gets overlooked. When I moved here, I realized how special it is to come from a place that I kind of hated. In leaving, I fell in love with the vastness of it and learned a lot about abundance through absence.
Growing up, I learned how to fall in love with the land in a way that I don’t think people in New York can. The last place I lived in Colorado before moving here [to Brooklyn], had a patch of grass in front of it. Do you know about the Schumann resonance? [I said no]. So the Schumann resonance, and I might butcher this, but it’s essentially the vibration which gives off the heartbeat of the earth.
It’s this humming noise that you can find on YouTube. This hum exists right in the sweet spot between deafening and
silence. I used to sit on this patch of grass just about every morning and listen to the Schumann Resonance, so that my heartbeat could kind of align with the heartbeat of the earth. And you can’t do that here. I have moments of peace in this place, but it’s hard to find them.
Depicting a Hidden Southwest Through Painting
I wanted to talk about the Southwest and the American West in a way that I feel that a lot of painting hasn’t. I wanted to talk about rural illness, teenage life, boyhood, the experience my family has had. I want to talk about these things that everybody has experienced in the Southwest, but in my way, and hoping that people will question their own families, hometowns, or even remember parts of their childhood that might have been fucking awful.
I think I arrived at a lot of these things by remembering tragic experiences. Somebody once asked me what does belonging mean to me? Or what does it look like? And I didn’t know how to answer it. I think of belonging as a horizon point because as you get older, belonging always changes upon arrival. Belonging is a gift that you give yourself; that’s what I try to do with my paintings.
Belonging can sound incredibly boring at the same time because once you arrive at that destination, I think that you become limited. Whereas if I’m constantly finding a new way to belong, I’m constantly opening my lens to new things. For example, going to Greece this summer, and realizing that this Mexican experience has a lot of similarities to one of the most ancient places on the planet. It was fucking cool.
Caleb Hahne Quintana Considering His Place Within the Canon of Southwest Painting
I find that a lot of painting right now is maximalist. I’ve felt the need to participate in this conversation but have realized that everything I can say is all I desire without including a plethora of references. I find that the absence of these things lends itself to memory. When you reflect on certain parts of your life––the best parts, the worst parts––it’s not a perceptual experience.
You’re experiencing an emotion or distanced relationship to a place, not the particulars. You see them as a green fuzz in the corners. You’re not thinking about the red shirt, you just understand that he was wearing a shirt. So, I tried to do that with land and in thinking about the ownership of land. I started thinking a lot about the ownership of water, the ocean even, and how we assign notions of property. I think about my family’s migration. They were in a border town, and there beneath them was this mark of the border on a map. That mark is the only thing separating people’s claims of ownership.
These places in my paintings become non-places; the idea of them being Southwestern is through the palette. There are times where I titled paintings specific to a land; I have made a painting about San Luis Valley and other places related to my family’s migration story. Oftentimes, though, I’m trying to invoke the abundance of absence.
People everywhere have lived in the desert since humanity has existed, and they have done it without the intervention of modern technology. Now, people feel the need to intervene in those places. It disrupts the order of history, natural earth and being.
The other testament in my work is the feeling of desolate land. In mountainous landscapes, and in deserts, I think about how much sediment has never been touched by a human being. I love meditating on the space that is unscathed by anything other than its natural processes. This is what I mean by non-places. Which is also why I’m struggling with these domestic scenes – Caleb points to studio wall –. I want to talk about the memories inside a home and it becomes an actual place. I am challenging myself to talk about location.
Caleb Hahne Quintana’s Process
I have a catalog of photos and screenshots of things I’ve seen, Instagram stories of friends back home, and random things. Sometimes it takes me time to return to an image. I just kind of like letting these things arrive. I begin a body of work when I find a curiosity. I am fascinated by things that I struggle to talk about. The brothers series I’m beginning was birthed out of two things: an Alice Neel book and a Lucien Freud book. Alice Neel painted two Puerto Rican brothers sitting on a chair in her room.
I fell in love with this piece immediately. I have a lot of people who are brothers in my life, and it became a double portrait. That got me into Lucien Freud, and his portrait of a woman and her dog, which he calls a double portrait. Traveling is an experience you can’t replicate and must be physically felt. In storytelling mythology and reality are quite similar.
When I went to Mexico for the first time, there was something that I felt in my body that I had never felt before. Your stories shift from myth to something real, embodied. While traveling, I sometimes hear something, a story usually, that just resonates in my heart, and I will hold onto that feeling. Even in Brooklyn, there is this seemingly infinite well of inspiration. I’ll get off at a train stop I’ve never been to and I’m like, “where the fuck am I?” When I return to the studio at home, I respond to that feeling or thought.
Depictions of Men and Masculinity as a Search for Wholeness
Early on, maybe in 2018, I was confronting my own kind of understanding of machismo culture. I’ve participated in violent combat sports for so much of my life––boxing, jujitsu, these sports that test your masculinity. I started unpacking my relationship to masculinity when my grandfather lived with us.
He was ex-Vietnam, and spent a lot of time in and out of prison most of my life. He was in Hells Angels. Truly, he was the baddest motherfucker on the planet, I swear. But he always gave me this space and permission to cry. I feel so fortunate to experience such a vast wealth of emotions which I feel is unique for a male in this society.
In the sports I played, men never allowed themselves to cry. I remember a good friend of mine was going through a hard time and I asked him when he had last cried. He told me that it was the first time someone had asked him that question. It was a bizarre experience to give another man permission to feel his feelings fully.
Interrogating Codes of Masculinity Through Literature and Relationships
I also started getting into bell hooks and Rebecca Solnit. In the book The Mother of All Questions, she talks about the silence of men, a new concept for me. I wanted to make these paintings about men in my life with similar experiences, who I love and who I would fucking die for.
I wanted to be about these men, but instead put them on a pedestal in a way that maybe they never had experienced. I wanted to paint my friends through heroism, not through voyeurism. I never let my friends know before I paint them, I just let them discover it after the fact.
I painted Rogelio [one of Caleb’s best friends who reappears in his work], triumphant on a horse in Colorado, and in a crowd of people. I think about belonging and masculinity as a sense of place, so he rides the horse in the arena, and the crowd cheers him on. He’s fucking beautiful, a beautiful human.
The Solitude and Intimacy of Caleb Hahne Quintana’s Process
I try to balance vulnerability and privacy. So when I make a painting about a relationship or a memory, the more specific I get, the more I feel like I alienate the audience. I’ve done it in the past and people will say, “Oh, this is so beautiful, but I don’t get it.” I wanted to move away from specific instances and let it exist for more people. I don’t want to paint about things that I’ve already experienced and have the audience go, “Huh?” I want to be able to paint about things that I’ve experienced that are relatable to more people.
Color and Form as a Language
Color is such a beautiful and wild thing that allows us to articulate so much. I’m not a conceptual artist, I can’t paint a painting with an idea that doesn’t also consider formal elements. I don’t like to solely rely on a formal approach, but it allows me to focus on an idea, on what I want to say, and how I want to say it.
Painting and Language Interwoven
Painting and language, I don’t think one is better than the other, and both must exist in harmony. I’ve always been better at the image, and it’s a challenge for me to write about my work. I want to be more poetic with my writing. I want to leave things more open-ended and less specific because I want it to be more relatable. What I try to achieve is this harmony of emotion, and a relatability to the painting and language.
Caleb Hahne Quintana: Painting as a Means of Memory and Feeling
Caleb Hahne Quintana’s paintings delve deep into his personal history, family genealogy, and the complexities of identity. Through his work, he explores themes of migration, masculinity, and belonging, revealing intimate narratives while leaving room for broader interpretations. The fusion of memory and feeling in his paintings creates a space for viewers to connect with their own experiences and emotions, bridging the gap between art and language. As Caleb continues to question and challenge his own relationship with the Southwest, his journey in painting serves as a testament to the power of storytelling and the visual language of color and form.
