Featuring a piano from his studio, a former church building in the Hudson Valley, this vibrant painting by Angel Otero is a standout among his new work at Hauser & Wirth Gallery. Otero once created abstract images from sheets of dried oil paint; he now employs a combination of techniques from paint on canvas to collaged paint, resulting in thick, complex surfaces that suggest layers of memories. Inspired by recollections of his upbringing in Puerto Rico, ‘Concerto’ acknowledges the personal resonance of objects like dentures in a glass, a large cooking pot or the magical suggestion of a school of goldfish filling the air. (On view in Chelsea through Dec 23rd).
Angel Otero, Concerto, oil paint and fabric collaged on canvas, 95 x 95 x 1 ½ inches, 2022.
Using skins of dried, peeled paint as a collage material, Angel Otero adheres color to his canvas in fleshy pinks and mustard yellows that recall deKooning’s sensuous Pink Angels tempered by a cooler palette. (At Lehmann Maupin on the Lower East Side through Dec 31st).
Angel Otero, Come Sleep with Me: We Won’t Make Love, Love will Make Us, oil paint and fabric collaged on canvas, 96 x 72 x 2.5 inches, 2015.
Brooklyn-based artist Angel Otero adds towers of ceramic and steel to a selection of his trademark textured paintings created with oil skins in his latest body of work at Chelsea’s Lehmann Maupin Gallery. Lauded for suggesting ‘secrets unearthed,’ not ruins but ‘ideas to build on, models to live by,’ in a recent piece by The Village Voice’s Christian Viveros-Faune, Otero’s fired steel and glazed porcelain ‘Slot’ sculptures evidence a remarkable drive to alter his materials. (Through Nov 2nd).
Angel Otero, installation view, ‘Gates of Horn and Ivory’ at Lehmann Maupin Gallery, Sept, 2013.
Angel Otero, 'There's nothing so I wonder," 2011. Photograph courtesy of Lehmann Maupin, New York.
Angel Otero’s unconventional process—fashioning assemblages or lively paintings using “skins” of oil paint applied to glass before being peeled off—is the draw in his New York solo debut. An awkward anthropomorphic object perched on a chintzy armchair, messy Expressionist interiors in garish colors and one uninspired composition with text demonstrate the young artist’s competing sensibilities. Far better are Otero’s large-scale abstractions—action paintings in which paint itself seems to have agency, shooting off the edge of the canvas, bunching dramatically or seductively veiling its support.
The show’s smallest and punchiest piece—a black number whose surface is concertinaed like a crushed soda can—has an affinity with Piero Manzoni’s pleated white canvas, but in place of purity there is an excess of paint, piled up in waves as if to hide some (perhaps failed?) experiment beneath. Likewise, a blocky form wrapped in streaks of yellow and black traffics in concealment, channeling Christo’s early wrapped objects—minus, unfortunately, the mystery.
The play between a vibrantly colored surface and an occasionally glimpsed support that is waxy and dead is more alive than, say, Steven Parrino’s twisted and pulled canvases, and aligns Otero with Fabian Marcaccio’s use of paint as a sculpting material. Recurrent blurring also recalls Gerhard Richter’s scraped abstract canvases, but unlike Richter, Otero’s intent is to build, not cancel out. His undulating skins re-create the drama of a hastily drawn curtain, awaking the senses and offering a celebration of paint’s possibilities.
Originally published in Time Out New York, issue 807, March 31 – April 6, 2011.
