Alejandro Otero

Biography

In 1949, at the Museo de Bellas Artes in Caracas, Alejandro Otero exhibited “The Coffee Pots”, paintings made in Paris in 1946–1948. In this series the coffee pot, the bottle and the lamp gradually stop being objects, and the painting moves from representation to abstraction. Conservative Venezuelan critics greeted them with an uproar, and the noise in the end helped abstract art take hold in the country. Two canvases of 1947, “Blue Coffee Pot” and “The Bottle and the Lamp I”, are now in the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Otero was born on 7 March 1921 in El Manteco, in Bolívar State. From 1939 to 1945 he studied at the School of Fine and Applied Arts in Caracas under Antonio Edmundo Monsanto, painting portraits, nudes and landscapes. His first exhibition was held in 1944 at the Ateneo de Valencia, and in 1945 he won two prizes at the Arturo Michelena Salon there. That same year he left for Paris on a scholarship and lived there until 1952.

It was in France, under the impression of Picasso, that “The Coffee Pots” came about. In 1950, together with Pascual Navarro, Mateo Manaure, Carlos González Bogen and others, he founded the magazine Los Disidentes (“The Dissidents”), which called for the renewal of Venezuelan art and urged it towards European abstraction; a group of the same name formed around the magazine. That year Otero travelled to the Netherlands to see Mondrian. From this came “Colored Lines on a White Background” and the “Orthogonal Collages” of the early 1950s, a tight weave of horizontal and vertical strips of coloured paper in which the idea of the module first appeared.

Back in Caracas, at the invitation of the architect Carlos Raúl Villanueva, he joined the “synthesis of the arts” at the University City. Alongside Arp, Calder, Léger, Vasarely and Soto, Otero made murals, stained glass and “Polychromies”, façades in glass mosaic, for the campus.

From 1955 to 1960 he painted seventy-five “Colorhythms”, his best-known series. They are tall rectangular boards of wood or Plexiglas on which Duco, a glossy industrial lacquer, is applied with a spray gun or roller. Even, parallel dark vertical bands run across a white field, coloured marks are set between them, and they set the whole surface in motion. Rhythm and colour matter more here than form, and the picture seems to expand beyond its edges. Otero himself understood such a surface as a field of forces that works at once as painting, volume and architecture. The Museum of Modern Art in New York bought one of the “Colorhythms” as early as 1956. In 1957 Otero won the CAVA and John Boulton prizes, in 1958 the National Prize for Painting at the Official Salon in Caracas, in 1959 an honourable mention at the fifth São Paulo Biennial, and in 1960 first prize at the second Inter-American Salon of Painting in Barranquilla.

In 1960–1964 he lived in Paris again, making assemblages of found objects and works in coloured paper. Afterwards he served as vice-president of the National Institute of Culture and Fine Arts. In 1964 he shared the National Prize for Applied Arts with his wife, the painter Mercedes Pardo, and in 1966, again with her, won a prize for enamel at an international exhibition of artistic crafts in Stuttgart.

From 1967 urban sculpture became his main concern: the kinetic “Vibrating Vertical” and “Rotor” brought together art, science and technology. In 1971 Otero received a Guggenheim fellowship and worked at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His “solar” sculptures grew out of stainless steel: “Delta Solar” by the National Air and Space Museum in Washington (1977), “Estructura Solar” in Ivrea (1980), “Abra Solar” in Caracas (1982), “Torre Solar” at Guri (1986). It seems to me that the “Colorhythms” continue in them: the same light, rhythm and movement, only brought out under the open sky.

In 1985 the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Caracas mounted a retrospective of more than seven hundred works. In his last years he tried working with digital means. Alejandro Otero died in Caracas on 13 August 1990. Soon afterwards the La Rinconada Museum of Visual Arts was given his name, at the twenty-first São Paulo Biennial in 1991 he received a posthumous honourable mention, and in 2012 the “Colorhythms” were shown in an exhibition of their own at the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo.