ANGEL OTERO

– Angel Otero

Angel Otero is known for his signature approach to visual storytelling, synthesising magical realism andabstraction, the observed and the imagined, and the past and the present. Beginning 1 June, Hauser & WirthHong Kong presents ‘The Sea Remembers,’ Otero’s first solo exhibition in Asia since he joined the gallery in2022. Through a labor-intensive process of laying down, scrapping and collaging oil paint, Angel Otero’s worksare rooted in abstract image making and engage with the idea of memory through addressing art history, aswell as his own lived experience.

Consisting of 10 new paintings and spanning two floors of the gallery space, the exhibition includes vibrant large-scale canvases that merge the figurative and abstract sides of Otero’s innovative technical practice, advancingthe artist’s exploration of oil paint as a medium and a conduit for self-reflection and analysis. Drawing from hischildhood growing up in Puerto Rico as well as more recent memories, and influenced by the gestural mark-making of canonical artists like Willem de Kooning, Otero has invented a visual realm that evokes the enchantingand sometimes strange ways in which everyday objects become personified through the lens of memory.

The exhibition takes its title from the painting _The Sea Remembers _(2023), where an upright piano from Otero’sstudio, a former church in upstate New York, sits against an undulating crimson background and is engulfed bywater. The instrument is surrounded by objects from his childhood home, like cabinets and a rotary phone, aswell as drawings of waves and a sailboat. Below, the floor–visible through the water–is covered by decorativetiles that are a familiar sight in Puerto Rico, featuring patterns inspired by traditional sixteenth-century Spanishtiles. Found throughout homes in Puerto Rico, these tiles represent both the artist’s personal recollections andthe collective memory of colonialism in Puerto Rico.

Otero often thinks about the subject of the sea–something that is beautiful, but also terrifying. This exhibitiondebuts a new body of work in which he pushes the water motif further to create swelling and expansivewaves, such as in Breakwater (2023) and The Voyage (2023), forging a connection between growing up inPuerto Rico and showing in Hong Kong–islands both surrounded by this powerful yet beautiful force. Thesewaves represent the artist and the shifting nature of his memory. Otero said ‘The idea of the singular waves ismetaphorical, they are not a part of the landscape. They are singular objects, with specific meanings of washingout, taking away, bringing in and changing. They are the waves of emotion, and at the same time they’re nature.‘Within the waves, Otero embeds objects like chairs, beds, and mirrors—objects that often stand in for familymembers. Throughout this grouping of works, Otero depicts quotidian objects that Otero has imbued withsurreal qualities–blurring the line between gesture and allusion, documentation and recollection to evoke adreamlike state of consciousness.

The exhibition also includes a selection of new works, like Caribbean Symphony (2023) and Moonriver (2023),that are predominantly abstract. In a reversal of the typical painting process, Otero begins each new work bypainting the foreground scene on plexiglass first and then working backward, in layers, so the background,frequently inspired by historical abstract masterpieces, is painted last. He then builds in a layer of fabric to holdthe entire structure together before scraping it off and fixing it onto canvas. Afterward, Otero continues to add tothe surface, collaging images of items like pots and pans, window shutters, bingo tickets and folded paper fansfrom a repository of previously made works to create an entirely new, multilayered composition. In this way, theartist merges process and intent: through the skilled layering and mixing of fragments from different sources, heeffectively emulates the ways in which our memories of the past, imprecise and frequently distorted, are piecedtogether to construct our present.