Tatler takes a sneak peak inside the artist's studio, and speaks to him about his creative process and how he engages with memories
One of Angel Otero’s first drawings was of Hello Kitty. At the age of six, the Puerto Rican artist saw his neighbour, a young girl, drawing a perfect copy of the cartoon character. He was fascinated by what he saw and wanted to try it for himself. “It wasn’t because I was into Hello Kitty or anything,” he’s quick to clarify. “I was just amazed that she was able to draw perfectly from memory, and I wanted to learn how to do it.”
Otero has since moved on to more challenging characters and motifs, and developed his well-recognised abstract collage aesthetic. In his high-ceilinged industrial Brooklyn studio, paint-speckled tools, collaged memorabilia and vibrant, chaotic canvases fill an otherwise clean and organised space. Most prominently, three canvases featuring three singular waves in various stages of completion sprawl across stark white walls.
Waves were one of the earliest standard motifs the artist was formally taught how to draw—he recalls being told to write to write the letter “C” and build from that, adapting the curved lines to make swelling bodies of water. “It’s these things I hold onto when I’m thinking about art—my early beginnings as an artist and my connection to my past.”
The ocean has long been an important part of Otero’s life—he grew up in Puerto Rico—and water and aquatic themes are ubiquitous throughout his work. Most recently, waves feature in new paintings the artist has made for The Sea Remembers, an exhibition currently on view at the Hong Kong gallery space.
The artist spoke with Tatler at his Brooklyn studio three weeks ahead of the exhibition opening, giving us an exclusive look at his laborious painting process, which includes building up layers of paint and scraping bits off them, yielding a distorted, often abstracted image. His proclivity for abstraction and paint as a medium is further exemplified in his use of “oil skins”, an innovation he’s become known for. These “skins” are scraps of dried paint made from layering oil paint onto a plexiglass surface and then peeling them off when they’re partially dried. They are then layered onto the canvas to make entirely new images and patterns, often in ways that reference important painters in art history, such as abstract expressionist Willem de Kooning.