In 1958, he finished the painting course at the Lisbon School of Fine Arts, where he metRené Bertholo, Gonçalo Duarte, coast pine It isLourdes Castro. In a studio shared withJoao Vieira, René Bertholo and Gonçalo Duarte on the top floor of “Café Gelo”, joins the group of visual artists who became known as “Ice Coffee Group”.
Before that, however, he had already joined the MAR (Movement for the Renewal of Religious Art) started in 1952 and which, quoting, “corresponds to the realization of the will of a group of Catholic artists committed to elevating religious architecture and sacred art in Portugal to greater dignity and plastic quality, in a formal opposition to the maintenance of traditionalist architectural models in the new religious constructions of the urban centers of Lisbon and Porto”.At MAR, among others, Nuno Teotónio Pereira, João de Almeida, Nuno Portas, Erich Corsépius, Diogo Pimentel, Luíz Cunha, António Freitas Leal, Manuel Cargaleiro, José Escada, Flórido de Vasconcelos, Madalena Cabral and Maria José de Mendonça.
In Paris, from 1959 to 1969, with Lourdes Castro, René Bertholo, António Costa Pinheiro, João Vieira, Gonçalo Duarte, Christo and Jan Voss, he was one of the founders of the groupKWY ("Here We Go") defined as a space "in which artists stopped grouping themselves by trends - as had happened in previous decades with theneorealists orsurrealists, among others – to, at best, join intervention groups […] that allowed them to act more effectively in contexts, but without the respective works assuming a common academic or aesthetic sense".
He exhibited, collectively and individually, from 1953 to 1979, not because he was concerned, or occupied, with promoting his works, but because his personality, his culture and the value of his work did not allow any kind of indifference.
“Escada um Príncipe Fora do Tempo”, (Lisbon, 2014) was the first large and comprehensive exhibition of José Escada's work ever held. It was due to the initiative of the São Roque gallery and its mentor Mário Roque, who gathered 95 works, many of them unpublished, consummated after almost 10 years of work.
Escada was a virtually forgotten artist. Today it is impossible to ignore it.
From the magnificent catalog of the exhibition, in a text by Sílvia Chicó and which gave the name to the exhibition «Do not forget José Escada, a “Prince Out of Time”», we allow ourselves to remove the following paragraph:
“Escada lived only forty-six years, and despite being highly esteemed by artists such as Vieira da Silva, was never a “consecrated painter” in life, but still a painter of any regime, but in the consensus of specialists he was, unequivocally, one of the great Portuguese painters of his time. Escada was a man of culture, of rare spiritual quality, discreet, a rich and multifaceted personality, who never did what he wanted.marketing of his works and never knocked on the doors of the press to promote himself.”
Also from the same catalog we note the reference that Rui Mário Gonçalves makes to the work of Escada: “Abstract or figurative, Escada's paintings are mystical-intimate constructions of the world, serving a meditation that perhaps sought to see man and nature in a great existential unity”.