The Brooklyn Rail

After a long stretch of making paintings that were non-representational and not abstract, but also not non-objective (their materiality being both object and subject), Angel Otero has been digging during the past few years to re-expose and recover the associative pictorial roots of his first mature work, front-loading images and things recalled from his childhood in Puerto Rico like those he used fifteen years ago. Nameable and identifiable components are often seeds for activating memories (Proust’s madeleine is the iconic example), but the thing about memories is that they only exist in a present that is perpetually instantaneous no matter how long something like a painting may exist. Otero’s paintings disrupt identifiers like first and last, front and back, and then and now by way of the deliberate displacement of their making. The paintings start in reverse: first applying layers of paint on large sheets of glass, and then carefully scraping the accumulation off as a literal skin of oil paint, Otero flips the script, adhering what was the last layer to a canvas support to expose what he had painted at the beginning, now also pictorially reversed. These are those most magical realist paintings Otero has made so far in terms of their imagery, but it is their real stuff (like the smell of that madeleine) that keeps them from collapsing into sentimentality.

River Mouth (all works 2024), for example, depicts an incongruous scene of a bathtub being used as a boat in a choppy yet rolling sea, painted in jagged marks of blues, reds, and violets with extended linear passages of white representing the whitecaps of waves. The tub—outfitted with a red wooden kitchen chair, a white plastic bucket, and a white net hoisted as an improbable sail—seems to exist in a fantastical zone between imagination and reality, simultaneously outfitted with purpose yet adrift. The dreaminess, however, has been disrupted both materially and associatively by a physical depiction of a metal window shutter. Somehow “installed” up against the top edge of the painting near its upper left corner, its rectangular form and protective function keep everything from tipping over into the mawkish.

Otero successfully reinforces the resistance his work needs with two large horizontal paintings that each portray a window shutter. Titled Look out my Window and Look out your Window, they rely upon a one-to-one congruence between each painting and the (in these cases, three-part) metal objects they represent, introducing an actuality into the exhibition that also assists in keeping things from becoming too sentimental. It should be noted, though, that Otero clearly likes to ride the sometimes razor-sharp edge between magic and the real, and the subjective and the objective, whether in the titles of these two paintings, or, I would say more risky, in the sculptural works he makes, three of which were included here. That said, of the other paintings similar in format to River Mouth, The Runway also maintains that edge to some extent, due to the engaging incongruity of its overall composition (as well as an image of a large table that brought to mind those found in some of Elizabeth Murray’s paintings), while other works like Neverland, Forbidden Games, and Constellation come off as more tame accumulations of the stuff of childhood like paper boats and paper airplanes.

Tameness remains the issue that separates the best of Otero’s paintings from the ceramic and metal sculptures. Materially, the sculptures just can’t do the magic that the painting skins pull off after being flipped around in time and space. (By the way, it should be noted that the vertical seams between the painting skins are discernible on the canvases. It is also clear that Otero paints images of additional objects on their re-exposed surfaces, collaging, it could be said, the very last things onto the very first.) A kiln is a presto-chango box to be sure, but what comes out of it is pretty much literally cooked: a sweet transformation of an upholstered armchair (Musical Chair), an arched decorative window frame (Rayuela [Hopscotch]), and a forlorn See Saw that emerges as the most successful of the three because of its firing creating a happy accident that led a wonkiness that gives it the most playful personality of the three sculptures. Otero isn’t the only tremendous painter out there who has an interest and an attachment to sculpture. From the very beginning he has demonstrated that he is up to the challenge of the pictorial and material agility that painting can activate, but I still wouldn’t bet against the reach of his magic, no matter what he does next.