Angel
Otero
New
Works
October
19, 2012 – February 4, 2013
Otero’s
painting process is anything but conventional—he spends as much time working
with dried paint as wet. Otero begins by applying layers of oil paints on a
piece of glass in reverse order. Once the paint is half-dry he scrapes it off
the glass and applies the richly textured oil-skin surface to a canvas. The
resulting compositions reveal surprising bursts of color and produce unexpected
wrinkles in Otero’s imagery. “I can control about fifty percent of the end
result,” Otero says. “But those limitations and the uncertainty are what spark
the dialogue that I aim for.”
Although
Otero’s canvases and assemblages take cues from Georg Baselitz, Philip Guston,
and Willem de Kooning, with a nod to the Spanish Baroque, he has also drawn on
his familial relationships and life in his native Puerto Rico, which he left at
the age of 24 to study at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.