“I’ve always embraced this idea of dancing with the personal and the historical in my work. I’ve used references to a number of from artists from that era—Willem de Kooning, Joan Mitchell, Jackson Pollock, Stuart Davis, and so on.”
— Angel OteroDeeply inspired by the significance of collage and memory, Angel Otero is committed to re-contextualizing iconic art historical imagery in his work. Executed in 2015, Figuring You Out was executed the same year as Otero artist held his first museum exhibition in Europe at the Atlantic Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. Rich, bright tones collide with alternating patterns to create a monumental mage of movement. A vivid example of Otero’s bold idiom, Figuring You Out notably comes to auction as the same time as his first solo exhibition at Hauser & Wirth in New York.
“I don't want my mind to inform my hand, I want my hand to inform my head.”
–– Angel Otero
Otero’s practice engages with the notion of memory, probing art history as well as the artist’s own lived experience growing up in Puerto Rico. Rooted in the language of abstract image making, his works meld art historical references ranging from Willem de Kooning, Robert Rauschenberg, Gerhard Richter and Mark Bradford. He has described his practice as one of erasure; one in which he dissolves the original meaning of his personal recollections through his rigorous, intuitive material-based process. In his earlier work, Otero took personal imagery of household objects or family photographs as a point of departure to create his paintings hovering between figuration and abstraction. Figuring You Out belongs to the series of works with which Otero began pushing even deeper into abstraction.
“There is no longer a stabilizing central image,” Jessica Holmes observes, writing on the new body of work Otero had created in 2015. “…rather, the canvases are entirely given over to great swathes of paint, rippling contours, and sometimes demanding lacerations from the blade. It is only when very close to an individual canvas that one may detect indications of the figurative lurking amongst the shadows and whorls of paint.”ii Indeed, closer looking of Figuring You Out reveals elements reminiscent of an eye, an outstretched hand or a paper plane that slip in and out of legibility as the undulating brushstrokes and vibrant colors compete for attention: “synapses fire as one ingests the rich colors, thick, physical hunks of paint, and sensual cross-hatchings of the artist’s cutting tool.”ii
