Tony Bechara: Annotations on Color Schemes

Inside Bechara’s thought process for his meticulously planned and painted colorful geometric grids

Published with Tony Bechara.

Puerto Rico–born, New York–based artist Tony Bechara (born 1942) served as board president of El Museo del Barrio for 15 years, while also honing his own geometric abstraction process. Dividing his canvas into hundreds of quarter-inch squares, Bechara meticulously fills each space in with complementary colors. The resulting grid paintings thus evoke a variety of cultural influences: from Seurat’s pioneering pointillism to hard-edge abstraction, traditional weaving and 8-bit "pixel art" of the last half century. In keeping with Bechara’s richly chromatic oeuvre, this artist’s book is inspired by Bechara’s notes and color formulas that form the basis for his acrylic paintings. It features over 130 illustrations, with foldouts and multiple materials, as well as a glossary of key motifs that introduces Bechara’s personal artistic language to the public for the first time.