Brooklyn Rail - Art Review - December 9, 2015
Puerto Rican-born, New York-based artist Angel Otero has refined a singular, labor-intensive process for making paintings. He applies thick oil paint to Plexiglas slabs and allows it to nearly dry before painstakingly peeling the oil skins away and reapplying them to canvas, to which he then adds and scrapes additional paint, resulting in an entirely new composition. Previously, Otero’s work incorporated highly personal imagery such as household objects or family photographs from Puerto Rico, resulting in work that often depicted highly abstracted, but still decipherable central images. He has also referenced art historical antecedents like Nicolas Poussin, Cy Twombly, and Philip Guston, a diverse selection of painters whose work nonetheless shares a mastery of color.
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