Neon Hunger
I painted walls, subway tunnels, stolen billboards. Loud, fluorescent, furious.
WaraHarlow
I paint the hunger. America that eats, Europe that forgets, the self that remains.
“I don’t paint people. I paint what’s left of them after the market is done.”
Thirty works. The same wound, seen from three distances.
I use oil, enamel, spray paint, bitumen. Sometimes my own ash, sometimes salt from the Channel. Open any work to see it large.
The Anesthetized
In Paris the color drained out of me. Bodies became products, then ghosts.
Sel et Silence
The noise stopped. White, salt, chalk, ash. I finally paint what is left inside.
I speak four languages: English, Spanish, French, and silence.
The last one I speak best.
There is a photograph lying face-down on my studio table. Nobody has ever turned it over. Nobody will.
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1994
Jackson Heights, Queens
I was born on March 3, above a laundromat on Roosevelt Avenue. The 7 train shook our windows every four minutes. My mother, Rosario Mamani from El Alto, sang me Aymara lullabies. My father, Daniel Harlow from Halifax, taught me to letter storefronts by hand: check cashing, 24 hrs, liquor, open. That was my first alphabet. Wara means star in Aymara. He never learned to say it right.
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2009
A winter
A hospital in Queens. I don’t talk about it. Ask me about color instead.
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2010
Trains
At sixteen, I was painting trains.
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2013
Cooper Union, one semester
They wanted me to explain. I wanted to scream. So I left.
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2017
Paris
I left New York with one suitcase and a roll of unstretched canvas. Paris took me in the way it takes in all its wounded: without asking, and without forgiving.
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2021
The Pays de Caux
I bought a stone barn near Fécamp with the money from one painting. No internet, one wood stove, a dead apple orchard.
Where I work
Rue des Cascades, Belleville
An old zinc workshop with twelve-meter walls, where my biggest canvases hang like slaughtered sails. At night it fills with musicians, poets and collectors, sometimes in the same breath. When I paint, the door is locked.
A stone barn near Fécamp
Chalk cliffs and a wind that never stops. I go there to disappear. It is where my quietest paintings were born.
Underground shows
- 40.7980 N, 73.9870 W2014
The Freedom Tunnel, Manhattan
My first show. Eleven works lit by flashlights, forty people and three rats.
- 40.6944 N, 73.9213 W2016
The Shaft, Bushwick
An illegal basement under a closed bodega. The police came before the wine ran out.
- 48.8618 N, 2.4411 E2018
Squat La Clef, Montreuil
Six nights, no electricity. The first time I showed Les Sans-Visage, by candlelight.
- 48.8339 N, 2.3324 E2019
Carrières de Paris
One night in the limestone quarries under the 14th arrondissement. I sent the invitations as coordinates.
- 52.4977 N, 13.2418 E2020
Teufelsberg, Berlin
A group show of artists of the collapse, inside the old Cold War listening station.
- 49.7439 N, 0.3108 E2024
Blockhaus of Yport, Normandy
One painting, visible only at low tide, for three weeks. Then the sea took it back.
I still refuse most white-cube galleries. Except one, and only because the owner once let me sleep there.
The ghosts I paint with
- Jean-Michel Basquiat for the rage and the words
- Francis Bacon for flesh as a scream
- Barbara Kruger for the slogan turned weapon
- Kara Walker for the silhouette that tells everything
- Käthe Kollwitz for grief without decoration
- Doris Salcedo for absence as a material
- Pierre Soulages for black that holds light
- Guaman Poma de Ayala from my mother’s shoebox
- My father’s signs the first art I loved, the last I forgave
“Every painting is a door I close behind me. One day there will be no more doors, and I will finally be home.”
In Belleville, they say I paint America so I never have to go back.
In Normandy, they say I paint the sea so it will forgive me.
In New York, they say I was never really there.
Collectors, curators, press
I answer letters from Belleville, slowly. Never in the first week of March.
Write to me