Untitled II 1962

Esteban Vicente made this unnamed print with blue and black ink, using some kind of printmaking technique – maybe lithography, maybe something else. The blue is scrubby and kind of smeared on, like a cloudy sky, or a blurry memory. Then those black marks just crash in, like a big, moody thought. It makes me wonder what Vicente was dealing with when he made this. Was he pissed off? Exuberant? I’m always thinking about what it must have been like to actually make the thing, you know? The physical part of it, wrestling with the materials, trying to get something out of your head and onto the paper. That one black swipe at the top, it’s so confident, like he just went for it, no hesitation. But then there are these hesitant little marks at the bottom, like he was second-guessing himself. Painters, we're all just talking to each other across time. We’re all in this messy, beautiful conversation, trying to figure out what it means to be human. And sometimes, you don’t need words, you just need a smear of blue and a swipe of black to say it all.