About

AJ Escalante is a painter whose work operates at the intersection of memory, material, and cultural inheritance. Working primarily in oil, Escalante develops layered, gestural surfaces in which figural suggestion and abstraction coexist. Forms emerge and dissolve through repeated mark-making, emphasizing painting as a site of accumulation and perceptual ambiguity.

Drawing on personal and cultural references, Escalante’s practice engages with questions of identity, history, and belonging without relying on fixed narratives. Influenced by his Filipino, Spanish, and Chinese heritage, his work considers how memory and inherited experience shape visual language, which allows paintings to function as open, affective spaces rather than descriptive representations.

Escalante is a current third-year student pursuing a double major in Art and Neuroscience at Connecticut College. He has completed an independent study with Tim McDowell in the fall of 2025 and will study at the Siena Art Institute in the spring of 2026.

He is currently developing a body of work for the ballet The Undertaker by Illarion Gershkovich, premiering at the Royal College of Music in London in March 2026.