“I was at complete f - - - - - - rock bottom. There was no lower that I could get.”
A little over a year ago, Cataphant was feeling as if all hope was lost. The local artist, whose real name is Catalina Bellizzi-Itiola, had just been discharged from the psychiatric unit after checking herself in two days after Christmas. Once she was out, her father passed away. A few days after that, the COVID-19 pandemic had ramped up to where quarantine measures were imposed.
“The lockdown started, and I was still very much debilitated,” Bellizzi-Itiola recalls. “I was going to an intensive outpatient program, therapy four times a week.”
“I was doing all this as the world was shutting down, and my dad just passed,” she continues. “At that point, I was like, ‘F - - - it, I’m just going to start talking openly about this. That was my main motivation. I’m just going to share my story openly, and that’s how I got to where I am now.”
Where Bellizzi-Itiola is now is something even she acknowledges as miraculous. Suffering from bipolar disorder and severe post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) after witnessing a violent incident, she is open and vulnerable when it comes to discussing the afflictions that both inspire and inform her abstract paintings.
“My husband and I talk all the time, and we’ll say, ‘Remember a year ago when you couldn’t even chew food?’ I couldn’t even leave my bed,” she says. “So I’m in such a time period of celebrating.”
While the work that will be on display at Bellizzi-Itiola’s first solo gallery show, “All My Thoughts Multiply,” could be seen as a celebration, the work is also meant to inspire an open discussion about our collective mental well-beings. For Bellizzi-Itiola, there’s a “sense of in-betweenness” that runs throughout the work.
“I think that all good art bridges significant gaps,” she says. “As artists, we create our work from a place of intimacy with ourselves. So bringing it out and to the open, there’s a huge sense of in-between. It’s one thing to make work that is intimately about my story, but it’s another thing to connect with other people over the things that I go through.”
Artist Catalina Bellizzi-Itiola, whose work will be exhibited at Swish Projects in North Park starting June 5.
(Nelvin C. Cepeda/The San Diego Union-Tribune)
‘It was scary’
To hear Bellizzi-Itiola tell it, there had always been something off when it came to her mental health. She grew up in Ohio the first-generation daughter of an Argentine father and a Colombian mother. She says her parents’ own traumatic backgrounds — one escaped a repressive military dictatorship, the other drug violence — permeated what she calls an “incredibly dysfunctional” household.
“I didn’t understand circumstances or even the causes of mental illness until I was an adult,” says Bellizzi-Itiola. “As a first-generation American, my parents didn’t talk a lot about what they went through in their respective countries. For that generation, that’s just what you do.”
She found an outlet in music and visual art, learning to play guitar and “drawing pictures of scary dead clowns” in her teenage goth phase.
“I just wasn’t great at emotionally regulating, so art and music have always played this key role in helping me to get centered,” Bellizzi-Itiola says.
After a brief stint at the Maryland Institute College of Art, she transferred to The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Once there, she did an interdisciplinary program in painting and arts education, and pursued a career as an educator after college while doing music on the side. But her own visual art practice suffered, and she says it didn’t really return until she moved to San Diego.
The circumstances surrounding that move, however, are disturbing and what ultimately led to Bellizzi-Itiola being diagnosed with PTSD. She’s understandably reluctant to go into the specific details of the incident other than to say she “witnessed a shooting.” While she says she had witnessed violent incidents before in Chicago, she and her husband made the decision to move to San Diego in 2017.
She did well initially and worked for a time with local artist Kelsey Brookes, known for his eye-popping, almost hallucinogenic paintings. Still, her PTSD became more prominent and, when compounded with her bipolar disorder, she found herself triggered by “visual disturbances” in places with a lot of color.
“The worse my depression and manic episodes got, the more my vision would start to distort,” Bellizzi-Itiola recalls. “My brain will be overwhelmed by all the details and it looks like every visual detail is crystal clear, and it’s just too much information. It was scary.”
After her hospitalization, she says she spent the first few weeks of the pandemic in a manic state, putting her artistic skills to good use by sewing 400 masks in a matter of weeks. Later, she began to paint again and her series, such as “Frida’s House,” “Dislodging” and “Grief,” work as preambles to the work that will be on display at “All My Thoughts Multiply,” which opens June 5 at Swish Projects in North Park (@swishprojects on Instagram).
“I’ve been asking myself, ‘How can I show what bipolar disorder feels like through paintings,’” says Bellizzi-Itiola. “I wanted to show movement, and the potential for more movement, because that’s what bipolar disorder is — you’re at the beginning of one cycle, and inevitably the cycle is going to get more intense and worse.”
After some tweaks, she says she hit a groove when the pieces began to “resemble masks,” which are actually supposed to resemble the perspective of looking down at someone’s brain, as if viewing a computerized tomography (CT) scan.
“There are specific parts of the brain that go haywire when bipolar is doing its thing,” Bellizzi-Itiola says. “So I pinpointed those parts of the brain in the paintings and painted structures that blossomed out of those parts of the brain.”
When it came to presenting the work, Bellizzi-Itiola had very specific ideas to present the paintings with songs by other artists that she feels perfectly convey a stage in a manic episode.
“I want people to feel how these different stages feel,” says Bellizzi-Itiola, who ultimately decided to display a QR code next to the paintings so that viewers could listen to one of these songs while viewing the piece. “Some people are going to look at the art and they’ll get it, but some are going to listen to the music with the art and then get it.”
The current work does seem to be more celebratory both in style and execution. And while it deals in an inarguably heavy issue, the colors are effervescent and pronounced. Asked whether “All My Thoughts Multiply” feels like a new beginning or, at the least, the culmination of years of struggle to get to a better place, Bellizzi-Itiola doesn’t hesitate.
“This is a very triumphant era of my life and my artistry,” says Bellizzi-Itiola. “I’m finally confident in my abilities to do these things well. So, yes, this is a big deal for me.”
Meet Cataphant (real name: Catalina Bellizzi-Itiola)
Age: 32
Born: Kansas City, Kansas
Fun fact: Bellizzi-Itiola initially wanted Mariah Carey’s hit song “Fantasy” to play on a loop at her art show, because the song, to her, feels like the “height of a manic episode.”
Online: cataphantmakes.com
Combs is a freelance writer.
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