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Alejandro Otero (1921-1990)
Description
- Alejandro Otero
- Untitled
- 28 1/2 by 23 1/2 in.
- (72.3 by 59.6 cm)
- Painted in 1961.
Provenance
Galeria Oscar Ascanio, Caracas (1990)
Private Collection, Caracas
Exhibited
Caracas, Galería Propuesta Tres, 1990, n.n.
Condition
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Catalogue Note
Je remets constamment tout en question. C'est mon drame.
—Alejandro Otero
After his second exhibition of Coloritmos at the Museo de Bellas Artes in Caracas in 1960, Otero returned to Paris, via Madrid. In his abundant correspondence with Alfredo Boulton early in 1961, we find crucial thoughts that help clarify many of the ideas behind what was later referred to as the Monochrome paintings.
January 4, 1960. He writes from Madrid: "It's been a great experience to be face to face with the 'idols' of the past, I have found just in some details of El Greco's paintings that enigma subsists, better, that this is the enigma that corresponds to what makes me a painter../.. I already see the dimension and the color of my future canvases."1 It's impossible to dissociate El Greco's brilliantly modulated draperies, executed in primary colors from the developments in Otero's studio on Rue Delambre a few weeks later: "I have been working fiercely since January 18, practically secluded, trying to make a material "speak," after having abandoned it ten years before: oil .../.. The writing, the color is eloquent and the canvases hold together well."2
His previous accomplishments in the field of abstraction with the series Líneas inclinadas(1950-51), his surprising geometric Coloritmo digression, and his epiphany in front of El Greco's expressive chromatic values may have led Otero in some cases to literally write [with] color to "explain," to communicate a forceful and fluent expression as in the case of El Greco's cloaks, as in Monocromo #12 (1961). By doing so, color utters its own narrative, its self-contained, uncontested, fundamental voice. This new mystical relationship that touches the domain of poetry might remind us at first of Yves Klein's sublime experiments. However, to "write color" is essentially a different, more abstract, materialistic approach than Klein's "monochromes [with their] irritating symbolic accompaniment," 3 as once wrote Christiane Duparc, thus denouncing the use of the pure medium and pure form to serve a bastard cause, however elevated.
Otero's writings on canvas are also fundamentally different from the work of the great writer-painter of the second half of the twentieth century—Cy Twombly whose endless graffiti are written on a painted background. Many years later, Twombly would coincide with Otero's early intuitions. In 1986, while sojourning in the port of Gaeta and facing the Mediterranean, he would produce one of the most exquisite sequences of completely abstract monochromatic paintings (Gaeta, Set I and II, 1986) in which he combined color and motion in a "handwork with paint"4 as curator Kirk Varnedoe would characterize the brief deflection in the master's production.
1 Alfredo Boulton, Alejandro Otero (Caracas: O. Ascanio Editores, 1994), p. 103.
2 Alfredo Boulton, p. 104.
3 As quoted in Pierre Restany, Yves Klein (New York: Abrams Publishers, 1982), p. 19.
4 Kirk Varnedoe, Cy Twombly, A Retrospective (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1994, p. 50.