Alejandro Otero: Rhythm in Line and Space

Alejandro Otero: Painter, Sculptor, Artist

At first it was the virtual space of painting, then the living space of architecture, and finally it was space itself. Alejandro Otero

Alejandro Otero (Venezuela 1921-1990) was one of the most original artists in modern Latin American art. Studious, restless, incessant in his work, sensitive and disciplined, curious and inventive, and above all a tireless observer of the world and of the times in which he lived (much like Leonardo da Vinci, I would say), Otero migrated between several areas of artistic work and thought, always managing to be up with the times, one of the leitmotifs of his work. A very complete artist and intellectual, he was also a writer and educator. Part of the opus that Otero bequeathed us are his abundant, analytical writings in which he reflected on his art, on the work of creators of the past and on the world in which he lived. As he put it, the artist’s “...main responsibility is to be aware of current events, of the changes within his vision and of the transformations that occur around him.”(1) Otero remained faithful to this principle.

Since his days of study in the School of Fine and Applied Arts in Caracas (1939-1945), where he was a student and later a teacher, Alejandro Otero devoted himself to drawing and painting, lasting passions in his career. From the beginning, he was one of the most outstanding students of his generation. At that early age he created still lifes, nudes, portraits and innovative landscapes.

In the late 1940s, during his first years living in Paris (1945-1949), having studied the work of Cezanne and Picasso, Otero the painter abandoned traditional figuration in his series of works known as Cafeteras (Coffee Makers). Otero took as models different everyday objects (coffee makers, candlesticks, pots, bottles, lamps, and even skulls) and bit by bit his representations of the object of reference become more distant, decomposing it (denaturalization is the term he used) until he began to create varied geometric forms and then just lines, colors and space, moving from a representational pictorial language to a more geometric one. After that time, Alejandro Otero's work, as Juan Ignacio Parra points out when writing about the artist's painting, is marked by the definition of the line. “In all his works that we can group together chronologically and didactically into series, the obligatory reference and, in the end, the artist's greatest concern, lies in his approach to the line in space.”(2) As we will see later, this is a concern that, linked to the concept of structure, will affect his work and become transcendental within his painting.

Otero abandoned traditional figuration and thus became the first painter to introduce abstract language into Venezuelan art. The Cafeteras paintings were exhibited in 1949 in Washington D.C. and later in Caracas, where they caused a real stir in the local art world and within art criticism.

The artist returned to Paris at the end of that year. In 1950, together with a group of avant-garde Venezuelan artists and intellectuals, he formed the movement Los Disidentes (The Dissidents) which published a magazine of the same name and which served as a platform for the defense of abstraction and an attack on the most conservative currents that prevailed then at the School of Fine Arts in Caracas. In the late 1950s, he traveled to Holland to study the work of Mondrian, whose creation dazzled and impressed him forever. The Dutch artist, along with Cezanne and Picasso, were the fundamental references for the development of Otero's mature work. 

Otero returned to Caracas in 1952. The series of Cafeteras was followed, in 1951, by another series of openly abstract paintings with a very explicit title, Líneas coloreadas sobre Fondo Blanco (Colored Lines on a White Background), which were composed of simple, straight vertical or diagonal colored lines rhythmically suspended in space, grouped into pairs, trios, quartets or up to 10 elements on a clear surface. The backgrounds of the first canvases were covered with only a thin layer of paint but in the last pieces the background gains more depth and texture. As noted by his friend, the critic Alfredo Boulton: “...with the severity of poetic and geometric beauty and with great minimalist eloquence, with high drama and classical elegance, the artist sets down simple lines that are the long and pure graphic accents of a very fine abstraction...”(3)

Also from 1951 is his series of Collages Ortogonales (Orthogonal Collages), clearly inspired by Mondrian, as the artist himself affirmed, composed of colored paper strips, intersected horizontally and vertically, forming a kind of grid or textile pattern, which produce great optical vibrations. If they resemble Mondrian, Otero said, “it is because of the use of straight horizontal and vertical strips, but they differ in the breadth and freedom of the range of colors used in this series.” In 1954, Otero created a pair of paintings entitled Horizontales Activas (Active Horizontals), rectangular surfaces occupied by parallel straight horizontal lines that achieve very dynamic optical effect.

Between 1955 and 1960, Otero conceived what is perhaps his best known series, the Coloritmos (Colorhythms), made with industrial paint on both vertical and horizontal wooden boards in an elongated format, a novelty at that time, whose varied compositions of lines and geometric shapes of colors revitalize the painting space and give it greater expressiveness. From this series, he produced eighty-three pieces, as well as six experimental variants called Coloritmos en movimiento (Colorhythms in Motion) (1957), in which the artist installed two sheets of Plexiglas in front of the painted board, thus enhancing the sensation of movement that the viewer experiences when passing in front of the work. For one of his Coloritmos he received the National Painting Prize in Venezuela in 1958, awarded for the first time to a non-figurative work of art. Otero participated with this series in several national and international events, including the Biennial of Sao Paulo and the Biennial of Venice, and won several awards. Works from the Coloritmos series were included in several Latin American art exhibitions organized in the 1960s in the United States. Coloritmo 1 was acquired in 1955 by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City, and then other American museums, such as the University of Arizona, the Dallas Art Museum and the Fine Arts Museum in Houston, among others, bought also pieces of the series.

Otero also developed his particular visual language in his murals, stained glass, engravings, sculpture and in other disciplines he practiced. He participated, along with other Venezuelan artists, alongside international artists such as Calder, Vasarely, Arp, Léger and Lobo, among others, in the Project of the Integration of the Arts, conceived and executed by the architect Carlos Raúl Villanueva in the City University of Caracas, where Otero was forced to work in new dimensions, large surfaces and with new materials. Between 1956 and 1960, Otero carried out a series of murals and stained glass windows integrated into the interior architecture of several buildings and on the facades of several high-rise buildings of the University. Noteworthy are the monumental and rhythmic polychrome mosaics that he created for the facades of the Architecture, Dentistry and Pharmacy departments.

Simultaneously, Otero produced murals and stained glass windows in private spaces in Caracas, among which are worth mentioning the mosaic and aluminum panel for the Mercantile and Agricultural Bank in 1954; the stained glass window for the house of Alfredo Boulton in 1956; the ceiling of the Teatro del Este in 1956; the polychrome in the El Paraíso Residential Unit in 1957; the monochrome relief panel for the Colinas de Carrizal Aquarium in 1959; and Color Cenital (Zenith Color), a stained glass window for the Anala and Armando Planchart Foundation Chapel, in Tanaguarenas in 1974, among others.

In 1960, Otero returned to Paris and began to work again with easel painting. He also changed his artistic language, painting a small series of oils on canvas, the Monocromos (Monochromes), beautifully lyrical works affiliated with the Informalista movement, in which the painter focused only on the painterly texture of the material, brushstroke and color. Then, impregnated with the New Realism in vogue at that time in France, he created his Ensamblajes y Encolados (Assemblages and Collages), a series of works of strong, sometimes violent  expressiveness that incorporate objects, residues, screws, nuts, locks, containers, wood, cardboard, paper, cloth, earth and other found materials on wooden boards. Some of these pieces are constructed with agglomerations of objects and residues, immersed in pasty colored paint, while in others the objects appear unpainted on a white background, at times with an isolated object (saws, pliers, gloves, brooms, etc.) hanging on flat wood, on fragments of windows or often on white wooden doors.

From the middle of this period are his series of Cartas sobre Fondo Blanco (Letters on White Backgrounds), a set of old letters, postcards and envelopes from time past glued on cardboard, with which Otero seems to establish a kind of nostalgic dialogue with art, with everything that fascinates him about time and with himself.

Back in Caracas in the second half of the decade, he created his Papeles Coloreados (Colored Papers), in which he again uses geometric language and emphasizes the use of color. These works are made from pages of newspapers cut into geometric shapes (squares and rectangles) and stained with different colors, leaving visible the news of the cultural, economic and social reality of Venezuela at that moment. As early as 1953, at the same time as he was creating his painterly easel work, Alejandro Otero had begun to install his creations within the real space of the environment by intervening public urban spaces. In that year he carried out five mosaic murals for the José Ángel Lamas amphitheater in Caracas, the work still of a painterly nature but into which he introduced three-dimensional metallic elements. In 1954 he creates his first openly sculptural work, Mástil Reflejante (Reflective Mast), a linear, straight column standing 14 meters tall and made from folded aluminum, installed on a busy avenue in the city where it still remains. Otero also created another smaller, non-mobile sculpture in 1959, the Policromía (Polychrome) in the Easo Building.

A defining moment in Otero's career occurred in 1967. Until that year he had dedicated himself mostly to working within a two-dimensional and immobile space, but in that year he began to focus almost exclusively on creating three-dimensional and mobile work, as if the flat surface was no longer sufficient for his artistic expression. (A parenthesis occurs between 1973 and 1986, when he created the series Tablones (Planks) in acrylic on Formica, which echo his Coloritmos but give a greater emphasis to color and to the relationship of space. Even when it was no longer manifested in a painting or panel, the concept of ‘the painterly’ was always present in his process of visual creation, something we will feel again, for example, in his magnificent later engravings and drawings).

On the occasion of the celebration of the 400-year anniversary of the founding of Caracas, the City Council organized in 1967 a series of cultural events with the participation of local artists. As part of the program, the next year, the so-called Zona Feérica (El Conde Fair Area) was created, located in the center of the city, in which Alejandro Otero, in some cases with the collaboration of his wife the artist Mercedes Pardo, installed a series of three-dimensional creations. Otero installed six public sculptures there created from iron, steel and aluminum: Vertical Vibrante Oro y Plata (Gold and Silver Vertical Vibrant), Integral Vibrante (Vibrant Integral), Noria Hidrocromática (Hydrochromatic Ferris Wheel), Rotor, Estructura Sono Vibrátil (Vibrating Sound Structure) and Torre Acuática (Aquatic Tower). At the time, the works’ presence was a visual and playful event in the center of the city. Some of these works are now installed in museums and others in public spaces of the city. 

That same year, his sculpture expands beyond the confines of Caracas when he installs his slim Vertical Vibrante Plata (Silver Vibrant Vertical) in the nearby city of Maracay. Alfredo Boulton wrote about these creations: “[Otero] built works in which he incorporated the action of movement by means of rotating blades that visually produced a permanent internal rotation in the life and within the body of the sculptures. These works no longer belong to a complete sculptural stasis but instead transform their metallic bodies in time to the rhythm of the wind and transmit this to the viewer's eye, integrating themselves into the real, everyday concept of the human being. They were of other temperatures, other uses, other skills.”(4) In addition to movement, Otero incorporates into these works other elements such as water, light, color and electricity. As the artist himself declared: