Angel Otero
When Angel Otero’s grandmother died in San Juan, Puerto Rico, the celebrated painter held onto some of her trinkets. Partly because she believed objects hold power, he has come to develop a unique working method wherein materials, influences and even found objects are recycled into his artworks. The most prominent of these materials is dried oil paint, which the artist methodically layers onto canvas in a signature process that brings the act of painting into collision with collage and printmaking, as well as the historical sources the artist relies on for creative sustenance.
The results of Otero’s physically rigorous and experimental techniques—arrived at via a hard-won reinterpretation of the physicality of oil paint—has led him to explore the potential for abstraction to engage issues of personal and collective memory in addition to formal concerns such as shape, color, and line. This artistic mission was very much on the artist’s mind when the COVID-19 pandemic struck. Having recently moved his family into a new home and studio in Malden, a small town in upstate New York, Otero rode out the global lockdown away from New York City, while bearing down on a new suite of highly allusive paintings. We are proud to debut three of them here.
— CVF, USFCAM
“I've been feeling the need to go home for some time.”
— Angel Otero
Artist Angel Otero.
About Angel Otero
(Santurce, Puerto Rico, 1981)
He lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
Angel Otero is best known for his process-based paintings, collages, and sculptural works that venerate the inherent qualities of his material of choice, oil paint. Employing various methods of collage, Otero explores the potential for abstraction to meaningfully engage memory and identity using line, form, and color. Through a methodically innovative process, the artist paints representationally onto large sheets of glass, scrapes the partially dried oil paint from the surface, and then reassembles the resulting “skins” into multi-layered compositions. In this way, the paint itself emerges as a crucial conceptual component, mobilizing ideas of chance, conveyance, and aesthetic vernacular, while the images and themes it visualizes become fragments or parts of a history energized by the material. Solo exhibitions of his work have been organized at Bronx Museum of the Arts (NYC); Contemporary Arts Museum (Houston, TX); Centro Atlantico de Arte Moderno (The Canary Islands, Spain); SCAD Museum of Art (Savannah, GA); and Contemporary Art Museum (Raleigh, NC). Recent group exhibitions featuring his work have been presented at Pérez Art Museum (Miami, FL); Museum of the African Diaspora (San Francisco, CA); and Wexner Center for the Arts (Columbus, OH). Otero is the recipient of the Leonore Annenberg Fellowship in the Visual Arts.
Artist website: angelotero.com
Artist Instagram: @oteroso
Gallery website: lehmannmaupin.com
Gallery website: kavigupta.com