“I’ve always been passionate about painting specifically. That’s what drives me—painting and all the drama that goes with it,”
Angel Otero, who channels that passion into paintings and sculptures layered with directly applied oil paint and the sheets that form when it dries, called oil paint skins. He covers his large-scale canvases with these thick, folding sheets, creating densely textured compositions full of hills and crevices. For his sculptures, he mixes materials like metal and wood with household items and furniture, which he then encrusts with the skins. Otero’s works range from entirely abstract, in his words, “purely gestural,” to semi-representative, incorporating ghostly figures, floral patterns, or evocative phrases. Inspired by his music-filled childhood home and the fiercely independent New York School artists, Otero pursues a bold, iconoclastic vision in all of his work.