Michael Cuadrado makes kaleidoscopic paintings that are replete with symbols and marks in motion. Using a range of media—from oil and acrylic paint to charcoal and chalk pastel to inkjet prints and paper—Cuadrado creates compositions that appear like quirky diagrams with flurries of irregular lines, arrows, circles, and rectangles.

Largely influenced by ideas around phenomenology, queer theory, and semiotics, Michael Cuadrado works with reinterpreted symbols and their relationships to color in hopes of answering the question: How should we love?

We spoke with Michael in his studio at Yale for a conversation on abstraction, his influences, and the spiritual nature of pattern-painting.