Angel Otero’s experimental layering creates works full of dimension
Part sculpture, part print, part collage
Looking at the folds and ripples of Angel Otero’s signature paintings, you might swear they were made with bunched-up fabric.
In fact, these “skins” are oil paintings that have been created in multiple layers on Plexiglass, then scraped and lifted, whole, as big sheets that are allowed to dry a bit more before Otero applies them with an adhesive to traditional stretched canvases.
That process made Otero a darling of collectors in a very short time, but other works in his first survey show suggest a fearlessness with just about any material that captures his imagination.
“Angel Otero: Every-
thing and Nothing,” on view at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston through March 19, takes its title from one of the paintings, but it’s also the name of a meditative Jorges Luis Borges story about an actor who feels he has no personality of his own until God tells him, on his deathbed, that he is “many and no one.”
Otero’s most poetic works are monumental hybrid print-drawings made with cadmium pigment and silicone on canvas. His ruined-looking sculptures combine messy wads of fired porcelain and steel — enigmatic objects that will strike some people as outrageously ugly and others as gorgeously evocative.
Otero, a handsome and soft-spoken man of 35, was beaming the day before the show opened. Although his work is so coveted by collectors he’s had waiting lists and he’s shown at museums and galleries around the world, Houston curator Valerie Cassel Oliver is the first to take a comprehensive look at his first decade of work.
“I tend to dance a lot between the subjects of the personal and the art historical,” Otero said. “Valerie found a way of connecting the dots with how these works coexist.”
He was happy to talk about his process.
Even as a youngster, Otero said, he was always more fascinated with how paintings were made than in the stories they told.
Otero was in his 20s, with a college degree and a respectable job as an insurance agent, when he decided to leap into the world of art and become a painter. He went, with scholarships, to the Art Institute of Chicago, where he soon discovered that many people think painting is dead.
Growing up in Puerto Rico, Otero was exposed to Old Masters and Modernists but knew very little about contemporary art — the installation and digital work so prevalent now.
His instructors pushed him to find his own language. Every time they visited his studio, they’d admonish him for being too derivative and pressure him to explain what his paintings were about.
“Verbalizing what I was painting was very complicated to me,” Otero said.
He wanted to evoke memories about his grandmother in Puerto Rico, in a home that had its own kind of Baroque environment with crochet tablecloths, precious porcelain figurines and fake gold objects.
His “a ha” moment came when he decided to reuse the “little mountains” of dried, leftover oil-paint residue that he was scraping from his palettes. Suddenly, his paintings were also collaged constructions that felt nearly three dimensional, and he liked the physicality of the process.
His professors liked the results, too.
Otero’s work quickly found an audience, and he went straight from graduate school to a prestigious Leonore Annenberg Fellowship in 2009 that enabled him to establish a studio in Brooklyn, N.Y., where he now lives.
“The Golden Vase,” a still-life from that year, depicts an urn of flowers on a table against a black background. He squeezed the table’s crochet-look cloth from a silicone tube. But the loose, translucent flowers look as if they might be made of tissue, and the golden vase looks like foil. Those bits are, in fact, dried and scraped oil pigment.
Oil paint can take months to dry completely, though — and before too long, Otero was out of material.
So he bought a little piece of glass, painted it in layers of red, blue and white, and let it dry for a couple of days. Then he took a spatula and scraped it off, and let it dry a little more.
“There’s little tricks these days where you can get oil to dry a little quicker than usual,” he said.
Colored residues came up with the white paint skin. That’s when he got the idea to create layers of entire paintings on Plexiglass and scrape them off to be reapplied on canvas — inventing oil paintings that are part sculpture, part print and part collage. The initial paintings are aggregated from historical works by the canon of Old Masters and Modernists he loves, although there’s barely a trace of that when a piece is complete.
“It felt so genuine and so unique. I felt so lucky, I just pursued it,” he said. “It wasn’t like I was planning — I just came across it.”
Today, Otero’s studio is full of big pieces of Plexiglass. He might start with a portrait, let it dry a few days, paint a landscape on top, let it dry more, then cover the landscape with something abstract or gestural.
“You start building layers of references. And as you cover the previous one, you start forgetting it,” Otero said. “You create this very unique abstraction based on that process. And the elements of drying and not drying affect the composition.”
He loves the blurred effects that result. “There’s a perception that there’s some sort of figure in it — you feel something. But at the same time, it’s pretty abstract,” he said.
Otero began making sculptures because art history was starting to take over with the skin paintings.
“I started missing the idea of going back into memory, the personal, the narrative,” he said. He did some paintings about the wrought-iron gate of his family’s home in Puerto Rico — which represented something rigid and protective but at the same time was ornamental. That also reminded him of his grandmother’s porcelain, which no one in the family was allowed to touch.
“Then I thought, it would be cool to make a gate … and mix those two elements,” he said. He had to buy his own large kiln because no ceramicists would allow metal in theirs.
“Ceramic artists are very strict with their field. There’s rules; they have to clean; it has to be a certain way,” Otero said. “I’m not like that. … Everything has a lot of chance involved in it. It’s something I embrace a lot in my work — not knowing what to expect from your decisions.”
In 2010, when Otero was practicing “randomly on the floor” with silicone to create the crochet effect of his early paintings, he wanted to see what might happen if he threw on some graphite dust and pressed the image into paper to make a monotype.
“Your mind starts planning,” he said.
That led to the charcoal-and-silicone transfer “My Father, When Young,” which he drew from a projected photograph onto canvas, using horizontal lines, “so it had a reference to etchings.”
The more recent “Uqbar” and “Lago” illustrate how that technique has evolved into something more abstract and distorted — vague landscapes that might be mistaken for ancient Asian ink drawings.
And now it looks like Otero might be on yet another path. Last year’s “Took the bed out, Flew Kites and Saw the seeds grow” is still a skin painting, but it’s less abstract, with a jumble of shapes borrowed from Picasso and Matisse.
He hasn’t done severely folded paintings for two years, he said, because they were becoming too much about surface play.
“I wanted to go back into painting and the depth of painting. So I started just collaging them flat and repainting on them sometimes,” he said.
Oliver thinks Otero’s work — like that of Jennie C. Jones, the up-andcoming abstractionist she featured last year — will have staying power.
“It’s important to understand the evolution of how an artist gets from Point A to Point B. Hence the 10-year surveys, sort of early in their careers, as opposed to one body of work,” she said.
She finds Otero’s paintings “very luscious, very seductive but also very substantial in what they have to say — very personal and yet very much about painting, too.”
Painting may be dead to some people, but collectors will always want new work to hang on their walls. And Otero’s could be there for quite a while.