Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
AAngel Otero is on the verge of tears. He talks about being in the band of fellow Puerto Rican artist La Casita – a song the singer used on stage during his stay on the island last year. Puerto Rico and in other Latin American countries.
“When I was invited, of course, I accepted,” Otero tells me, standing in his makeshift studio in Somerset. “Although I like to avoid things like this. This image is very similar to where I grew up, and I felt a lot when I got there. Yes, there is a show of being on the stage of a famous artist of our time, who comes from my island. But it led me to a subject that I have been working on for a long time.
Otero, 45 years old, was born in the Santurce neighborhood of San Juan, the Puerto Rican capital, “facing the sea”. Santurce has been growing up, but in the 1980s his grandmother Maria Luisa – with whom Otero grew up – faced several terrorist attacks. The family built a house above Otero’s mother’s house in Bayamón for him, where Otero spent most of his childhood while his mother worked full-time at a bank. “I grew up with women – all the men left early.”
The modest room with its furniture, curiosities and pictures, where many memories are kept, has been a recurring subject of Otero’s dreamlike, large, abstract form since he was a student in Chicago. Flowers and houseplants, a pink vanity cabinet, a four-poster bed, a piano, bird cages and clocks floating on a tumultuous beach are all in her new paintings that reflect her childhood home.
For nearly two decades, these writings have been an indirect way of representing Otero’s family and culture. As a student, he was nervous about taking pictures of his family members. He created an artistic style that challenged the style of oil painting, using paint skins – dried paint on Perspex – on canvas. It was born out of wisdom at first, but the process began to match what Otero wanted to say: a place to be used, sculpted, created, created by his works and an expression of the conflicts that live inside us, the parts of our lives clashing. His first experiments were warmly received by his friends and teachers, and the painted skins are now his trademark, a kind of collapse of collage and sculpture into painting.
We are standing in front of a larger-than-life diptych that is a figurative painting he created. It is based on a photo of Otero’s grandfather holding him on his birthday, wearing a sailor suit, showing the two from two different angles. Visceral colors have been placed on the image, so that it seems to fight with the surface. The image of the two is different, but distant, quickly disappearing under the fast life of today, like a memory.
Until recently, Otero admitted that he was “uncomfortable and insecure to put my story and my history in such a familiar place as art. Doors appear again in this new work – there is an image of a door mysteriously open in the middle of a lake covered with flowers. A ladder goes down, but you can’t see where. Otero is also installing a similar door sculpture on the floor at Hauser & Wirth Somerset, as part of his solo exhibition.
Otero’s new, bold works reflect “where I am in my journey as a father and a man”. His daughter is now a teenager; his father, who has not been around all his childhood, is suffering from lung cancer. (Otero remembers a trip to the Met museum in New York with his father – “but he didn’t go in, he just wanted to sit outside smoking”.) His grandmother Maria Luisa died years ago, but Otero still comes to terms with the loss. “These are parts of life – my relationship with my grandmother, the person who took care of me, taught me, loved me and made me who I am today. Now I have someone under my wing, and I have to think about who I will be to this person.”
The sea also figures heavily in all the new paintings – lending its title, Agua Salada (Salt Water), a fitting metaphor and image, and its power to read and heal. It also produces tears: the works have a kind of chaos, as if all the elements of life will be drawn into the present and towards the end. “I don’t want to be ashamed of being vulnerable, of being affected,” Otero says. “I’ve been moving around in different areas of technology, and it’s superficial.”
Otero has been living in Bruton for a few weeks now, doing the work and thinking about home. He has spent many evenings at the pub, the Blue Ball, chatting with the locals. He said: “It reminds me of my hometown in San Juan. He didn’t go last night, though, because he sees his paintings. “One day before the works go from the studio to the show, I like to stay with them all night. I open a bottle of wine and put on some music and just have fun and pay my respects.”
Agua Salada is about letting the past go as you hold on to the present as tightly as possible. It’s about home. “I’m happy where things are with this show and myself – I’m looking forward to putting it on the walls, not me and my story. Opening the door for people to come to my casita.”
