Untitled 1973

Jose Escada made this untitled painting with what looks like oils, and the square format gives it an all-over tessellated quality. The palette is earthy, lots of browns and blues, but the forms are playful and the way Escada handles the paint is really interesting. He’s building up these layers of looping lines, some thick, some thin, creating depth through color and texture. If you look closely, you can see the way he’s built up these colors, the brushstrokes are visible, it's like you can see him feeling his way through the process. See that little pop of orange in the lower part? It’s like a little spark of energy in the midst of all the earthy tones. You could say the whole piece is a conversation. The later works of Philip Guston come to mind; in both there’s this sense of searching. Art's like that; it embraces the open-ended and the multiple.