Color, carried: Tony Bechara’s Annotations of Color Schemes at LongHouse

Tony Bechara: Annotations of Color Schemes is at LongHouse Reserve in East Hampton.

Photos by Avalon Ashley Bellos

Late-summer East Hampton wore its golden hush on Sunday—the kind that turns memory into lacquer—when we gathered at LongHouse Reserve for the posthumous launch of Tony Bechara: Annotations of Color Schemes (Lisson Gallery). The chair he meant to occupy remained empty; everything else in the garden insisted he was still here.

Tony Bechara, Puerto Rico–born, New York–made (1942–2024), was the rare abstractionist who turned rigor into velvet. His canvases—meticulously gridded into hundreds of quarter-inch squares—are not simply systems; they are orchestras tuned to the key of light. Cell by cell, he lays complementary hues until the eye begins to hear it: Seurat’s pointillism rephrased, hard-edge discipline loosened just enough to breathe, traditional weaving recalled at the wrist, the delicious hum of 8-bit “pixel” culture redeemed by the hand. For fifteen years he served as board president of El Museo del Barrio, arguing—in deeds rather than slogans—for a platform worthy of Latin artists. With his dear friend Carmen Herrera, he shared a truth that reads like a vow: color is character.

The book itself—over 130 illustrations, foldouts, mixed papers, a glossary of motifs, and the artist’s own notes and color formulas—is a field manual for Bechara’s private language. You turn its pages and feel a method bloom: intuition throws the spear; intellect sends the army to find it. Phong Bui—artist, publisher of The Brooklyn Rail, a tireless partisan of authenticity, justice, and the radical accessibility of knowledge—gave the line a voice, quoting Bergman: “When I throw a spear into the darkness, that is intuition; then I must send an army into the darkness to find it—that is intellect.” The room did not applaud so much as agree; Tony painted that sentence his entire life.

What stayed with me as the afternoon lengthened was the glamour of discipline. Quarter-inch after quarter-inch, Bechara tuned the zeitgeist rather than chased it. Structure seduced; systems sang. Chroma, handled with nerve and tenderness, rose to the level of biography. The book makes that courage portable: you hold the studio in your hands and feel it breathe.

This moment also reminds us who keeps American art honest: immigrant voices. A city of arrivals taught Tony to speak in color, and he answered with a grammar that belongs to everyone. The immigrant imagination turns distance into method, memory into measure, and work into welcome. When we champion artists like Bechara—and listen to cultural stewards like Phong Bui—we defend the oldest promise of this place: that art is a second passport and looking is a civic act.

Sunday was not an ending; it was a relay. The volume carries forward the way Tony taught us to look—patiently, ravenously, with kindness toward complexity. If you love abstraction that behaves like music, if you believe color has a conscience, if you want a record of a life that turned precision into pleasure, find this book and live with it. Let it sharpen your eye. Let it widen your mercy.

Tony once mapped the world into squares and then flooded those borders with light. We stood in a garden, listened to Phong’s benediction, and watched that light hold.

Call to action: Support the mission that made this gathering possible. Visit LongHouse Reserve, become a member, bring a friend, and seek out Annotations of Color Schemes in the LongHouse bookstore. Walk the grounds where landscape behaves like sculpture and let Tony’s pages teach your eyes a new tempo. Wander the stunning grounds—a living poem of paths, ponds, and sky—and linger among the incredible art on display, where each work converses with the land and sends you back into the world newly lit.