Alejandro Otero (1921-1990)

Galería Oscar Ascanio, La Castellana, Caracas
Private Collection, Lisbon, Portugal

Caracas, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Alejandro Otero, February 1985, no. 101, p. 171

Alfredo Boulton, Alejandro Otero, Caracas, 1994, p. 85, illustrated in color

This painting is well-stretched. Minor paint loss is visible to the upper left corner. Additionally, craquelure is present in the impasto areas. Under ultraviolet inspection, four areas of in-painting are visible in the lower portion of the center quadrant, five and-a-half inches from the left edge. A one-inch line of in-painting is also present in the center of the work, approximately 8 inches from the bottom edge. Additionally, a small circular area of in-painting is present in the lower right quadrant, six-inches from the bottom edge. Overall, this work is in very good condition.
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In 1946, Alejandro Otero was feverishly working on pictorial ideas based on Picasso's recent post-cubist still life compositions. He would later remark, "In cubism, the space was pictorial, [it remained] on the plane; ... In the Cafeteras [as the series of ever more simplified coffee pots was later named] the space was more livable, it had to do more with a set design."[i]  After putting an end to his research of formal deconstruction in his Cafeteras, Otero started his first completely abstract body of work between 1950 and 1951 which would come to an end with a series of 13 catalogued paintings (some less conclusive canvasses were recycled by the artist at a later date) he called Líneas coloreadas sobre fondo blanco (Colored Lines on a White Background).  Therefore, it is clear that the Lines series were a natural and immediate consequence of the Cafeteras.

Between the two series the artist took some time to travel and exhibit his work.  He exhibited his Cafeteras under the title Still Life, Themes and Variations with José Gómez Sicre at the Panamerican Union in Washington, D.C. at the end of 1948.  He later continued to Madrid, Paris and finally to Holland to trace Mondrian to his roots. After the long pause, Otero returned to work in Paris. There, he abandoned models from real life and started a new painterly exploration of the abstract space.  "This was one of the most dramatic moments I had to live as a painter: it was about how to express something with nothing, or to reveal the nothingness in which I found myself after exhausting that way [the Cubist] way to approaching reality."[ii]

It was a turning point in Otero's career that would only resurface in the early 1960's with the monochromatic paintings and the assemblages and the "papeles coloreados." In this series, it appears that he had finally made possible a sort of "entente cordiale" between his restive impulse to represent ever changing environment and a subjective perspective on one side and the abstract intention that denies life accidents and eventually refer to plastic, self nourishing "truths".  In most of his paintings of this limited production, pure primary color lines appear in verticals and diagonals, as a signal of construction in space. Sometimes, a portion of the canvas was left untouched, adding a sense of dialogue between the crude linen surface and  the timid painterly suggestions. Towards the end of the series, as shown in this example, Otero covered the whole surface of the painting, often applying white over color lines or a color mass, making them almost invisible in the background.  This subtle but significant change, coupled with an expressive and rapid palette knife, work together to suggest the presence of a third dimension and reinforce the importance of the straight color lines as a concrete element against the animated backdrop of lyrical expression.

By the mid 1951, and in a matter of days, Otero would abruptly shift his interest towards a harder study and development of the late Mondrian's propositions with his Ortogonales which opened the way to his dynamic geometric compositions and murals at the Caracas University and finally his - arguably- to his greatest contribution to abstract art , the Colorritmos in 1955.

[i] Alejandro Otero, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Caracas, 1985, p 62.

[ii] Alejandro Otero, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Caracas, 1985, p 83.