Isaac Escoto: 3AM Eternal

Isaac Escoto picked the title for his second solo show at Jeffrey Deitch before he had fully articulated what the paintings inside it would say, and it's worth sitting with the two words for a second. 3AM is the graffiti writer's hour—the hour when Escoto, working for years under the tag SICKID, first learned to move through Los Angeles unsupervised. It's the hour we're told is when bad things happen, and it's also, as Escoto points out, when some of the city's labor is just clocking in: dishwashers, security guards, delivery drivers, the people keeping the lights on while everyone else sleeps. A hard-won innocence sits folded into that hour right alongside its danger. Eternal carries a similar doubleness; is something eternal because it lasts forever, or because it never resolves, the way a loop or an addiction never resolves? Is eternal about life, or about the flattening sameness of a death that keeps recurring? The show doesn't answer these questions so much as hold them open, the way Escoto holds open nearly every binary he paints: good and bad, pleasure and shame, exploitation and survival. Escoto's visual education didn't come from art school. It came from Adult Swim reruns and alternative comic books, skateboarding and graffiti crews, the pages of Juxtapoz and the hyper-saturated grammar of early-2000s video games; everything a kid of that era absorbed by accident, the everyday art nobody assigns as homework but that shapes a sensibility more than anything on a syllabus does. That vocabulary showed up loud in Gas Station Dinner, Escoto's first show with Jeffrey Deitch in 2024, a body of work that romanticized being what he told me was "down bad" and scrappy, the low-key romance of not having money, of making do, of just getting through it. Looking back with some distance, Escoto sees the chip he was painting with then as something closer to bravado. "I was painting with a really big chip on my shoulder," he says. Where that earlier work set out to prove he could paint anything—hard, photorealistic passages set against loose, cartoon-warped ones—3AM Eternal isn't interested in proving that anymore. The technical risk-taking has been rerouted into the subject matter itself. If Gas Station Dinner was the joy of survival, 3AM Eternal is its harder sequel: the necessity of survival. A word Escoto keeps returning to for this body of work is "hyperstimuli." Growing up steeped in those video-game interfaces, commercial imagery, and graffiti, he used to think of hyperstimuli as pure pleasure, as "eye candy." Now, he says, "it almost feels like we hyper-stimulize ourselves in order to drown out the things of the real world because the real world is so hard to deal with." Everything has been gamified; dating apps, food delivery, sports betting—not because gamifying is inherently bad, but because the mechanics of temptation are no longer hidden from us; they are the entire design. "There is no hiding that anymore when it comes to the things advertising to us, what they want us to buy," he says. His paintings borrow that same seductive vocabulary with fluorescent paint, metallic finishes, airbrushed gradients, a pastel candy-shop palette, and he uses it as bait. I always think when looking at Escoto's work about that weird dichotomy of video games—they have gotten darker since my youth, more about war games, car chases and some apocalyptic event and the zombies that follow. The subject matter is haunting, full of death and destruction. But you play these games, you immerse yourself in the darkness and compete in it. The color and gloss pull a viewer in close before the subject matter underneath, often much harder, has a chance to register. It's a Trojan horse built out of the very stimuli it critiques. Escoto locates his own project inside a specific lineage of American painters who took cultures the mainstream art world either ignored or misread and insisted on their full weight and complexity: Martin Wong's Lower East Side, Kerry James Marshall's insistence on Black figures rendered in the deepest possible black, Robert Colescott's satirical rewrites of American history with Black subjects inserted where white ones had always stood. What Escoto takes most directly from Colescott, and from an artist like R. Crumb working in a very different register, is the use of humor and grotesquerie as a delivery system—the twist that lets hard material land without curdling into a lecture. Like Colescott, he's interested in forcing a culture historically rendered peripheral, Chicano, immigrant, working-class Los Angeles, directly into a visual vernacular that has usually excluded it, using the same hyper-consumerist, candy-coated language that sells everything else in American life to sell, instead, the reality of the people that language usually leaves out. The paintings ask what's left of a person, or a culture, once the world has been stripped to its doom-core essentials—and then insist, in the same breath, on the joke, the flash of color, the wink, that keeps the answer from being unbearable. Which brings the show back to its title. 3AM is real to Escoto in a way that resists easy metaphor. It's the hour of both vandalism and labor, of danger and of people quietly getting up to go to work, the two never really separable. Eternal, in that light, isn't a promise of permanence so much as an admission that the conditions the show describes—the hyperstimuli, the surveillance, the binary judgments, the doom-scroll of it all—aren't going anywhere soon. Escoto has said that when things are going down, you can give yourself permission to document the darkness before the dawn. 3AM Eternal is that moment: unresolved, wide awake at an hour when it's unclear whether the worst has already happened or the day is only just starting, painted in colors too bright to look away from. Isaac Escoto (b. 1998, Los Angeles) started painting graffiti at age 14 under the name Sickid. His imagery and aesthetics are influenced