Untitled, 1950
Esteban’s collages are the creations which come closest to the gestural painting of Abstract Expressionism. The same as his paintings from this period, the collages display the sketched lines that deliver the movement, as well as directing the viewer to look at the work.
The use of glued-on paper does not produce the light and shadow effect obtained from his paintings, instead there is a spatial effect of depth arising from the contrast of the different plain coloured paper. Esteban Vicente, as it befitted the first years of the 1950s, introduced in the collage certain features that are typical of the gestural painting style, continuity and the contrast with interweaving (Action Collage).
The collages he created in 1950 and 1951 were usually executed using brown, ochre and black tones, with many striped areas in Chinese ink. He called his collages “paintings with paper”, insisting that whatever the outcome, it was achieved from the struggle among the nature of the matter of the materials themselves. The collage of the analytical cubism of Picasso, Gris and Braque reached its total abstraction in this piece.