Alejandro Otero's Liberation of Colour: Kinetic Dissidence in Venezuela.
By Elle Borissow
When describing the polychromatic abstract works of Alejandro Otero, journalist and critic Roberto Montero Castro claims that “it is light that inscribes us in Venezuelan-ness.” A light unique from anything born of Europe, or North America. To this end, he believed all great Venezuelan artists “reconstruct reality” and construct national identity, starting from light.
Light, sight, and the liberation of colour were integral to the development of Venezuelan abstraction and kineticism; in Otero’s varied body of work we can see these themes articulated across a multiplicity of media in his early Kinetic experiments, culminating in the Coloritmo [Colourythm] series (Coloritmo 41, (1959), fig. 4). Inclusive of industrially pigmented collages such as Ortogonal (Collage) 1 (1951, fig. 1.), gridded paintings like Estudio 2, (1952, fig. 2.), monumental public sculpture (notably, his Mástil Reflejante (reflective mast) of 1954 for Las Mercedes Oil Station, mural reliefs in metal/mosaic, and large scale public architectural commissions (most famously, the Policromía design for the stands of the José Ángel Amphitheatre (1953)), the Venezuelan modernist’s contribution to abstraction is prolific and diverse. The themes of sight and dissidence proliferate Otero’s experiments and their democratic ethos, delineating his works from wider currents of modernism to achieve a localised Venezuelan identity. His art is both specific to socio-political influences, and referential to broader currents of transnational abstraction during the twentieth century.
Figure 1: Alejandro Otero, Ortogonal (Collage) 1, 1951, Cut and pasted coloured paper mounted on paper, 32.1 x 32.1cm. MoMA New York, gift of Patricia Phelps de Cisneros in honour of Marie-Josée Kravis; copyright 2024 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / AUTORARTE, Venezuela.
As his abstractions progressed, Otero’s experiments became increasingly void of discernible traces of the artist’s hand. Opting often for industrially produced materials, his play with the canonically established role of artist as creator foreshadows the impending post-modern movement toward ‘non-object’ art. Otero is placed, therefore, on the ideological cusp of modernism and post-modernism. His playful compositions toying with notions of how best to define modernist authorship, evoking experiments in synaesthesia (notably the auditory/visual overlap), and inviting viewer participation. In Brazil, the movements Concretismo (c. 1950) and Neoconcretismo (c. 1959) originated from a parallel desire for an “honesty” expressible through “pure colour,” this potential being held by geometric abstraction’s paired back shapes for truth telling in the face of autocratic censorship. Functioning similarly, the (neo)concretistas’ contingency on a viewer’s autonomous eye, in conjunction with a reliance on a variable, randomly spatialised relationship between art and viewer – expressed through interactive play with the artwork - hinges on tactile experience. Though not appealing to our sense of touch in the same way as Lygia Clark’s concrete non-objects, Bíchos [Critters], Otero’s ‘liberated’ colours appeal to our sense of sight in motion, his artworks nevertheless exuding phenomenological pulsations designed for viewer participation and optical interactivity. The Coloritmos (fig. 3) play on diagonal planes of colour: the motion and lyricism of one colour overlapping another creating a compositional instability, to evoke an open-ended story. The interpretation is yours. In light of which, they can be seen as a localised Venezuelan formulation of democracy: equally fit within the wider network of modernist intellectual currents as they are for the formation of a national Venezuelan identity.
In Octagonal (Collage) 1 (fig. 1) Otero’s endeavour to “distill[] colour from its material instantiations” acquires a specific significance in presenting a complex “reflection on the relation between raw materials, finished products, and economic development in the absence of industrialisation.” Contextually, this is pertinent to the experience of many in the impoverished Caracas hills region, where wealth disparity rendered their home superficially transformed, yet economically unchanged in functional terms. Produced during his time in France, using what Otero himself terms “junk” materials, the significance of industrially produced coloured paper as a material illuminates both the experimental attitude he holds (a precursor in their orthogonal, gridded organisations to his Polícromia architectural designs) and a consciousness of this darker, exploitative side to modernity. The arbitrary overlapping of these uniform strips of colour evokes a jubilant juxtaposition, initiating interaction between both primaries and complementaries - but we might also observe the square ‘blank’ spaces of relief between them, and consider the poignancy of those (in)visible social and pictorial spaces in relationship. We might also look to Josef Albers’ experimental articulation of colour theory for an alternative interpretation of these ‘gaps’, Interaction of Colour (1963), in which Albers likens perception of colour(s) to musical compositions:
“So long as we hear merely single tones, we do not hear music./ Hearing music depends on the recognition of the in-between of the tones,/ of their placing and of their spacing.”
By noting the presence of play between colours, presented by Otero here in a state of “continual flux, constantly related to changing neighbours and changing conditions,” Albers articulates the ethos he taught later at Black Mountain College. Yet, though widely accepted now, such radical and unprecedented non-academic notions of colour theory – and modes of seeing – were met with great scepticism at the time.
During his time in Paris, Otero was particularly influenced by the movement of “New Realism” from which he drew, using “the grid as a non-mimetic organisational matrix for colour.” Working contemporaneously to Otero in Paris, were the Delaunays - whose radical chromatic experiments in Orphism were also founded in the vibrational overlapping of colour – and likely posited another influence for the Venezuelan artist. Having experienced the multi-cultural milieu of Paris, the forces of transnational exchange are strong in Otero’s works; his gridded compositions were a popular modernist means through which to ‘free’ and, paradoxically, visually contain the subject of colour. Mondrian, Kelly, and Kandinsky are just a few other artists with whom Otero may have interacted, their experiments reciprocally influencing one another owing to shared intellectual motivations. Also Torres-García, who spent a much longer period of twenty years in Paris, returned to his native Uruguay to formulate a parallel yet divergent thesis on colour and the grid: for him and his School of the South, abstraction became a means through which the continental region of South America (as a united whole) could be both universalised and localised, to incorporate what Torres-García perceived as a shared Indigenous history, whilst accepting and celebrating a uniquely diverse ethnic present.
Figure 2: Alejandro Otero, Estudio 2, 1952, Gouache on paper, 19.5 x 25cm. Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, 1990.95; copyright Alejandro Otero Estate.
The moment of Otero’s return to Venezuela in 1952 saw a period of accelerated modernisation in the form of an oil boom, with the country’s economic reliance on a wealth of natural resources becoming a topic of direct reference in the materiality of Otero’s abstractions. Venezuela saw major proposals to integrate art and architecture on a vast scale in the 1950s – among which was Otero’s commission for his Policromía stand design of the José Ángel Amphitheatre (1953) in collaboration with architect Carlos Raúl Villanueva. Despite functional success, intellectually it was ultimately unsuccessful in Otero’s eyes. He rejected the synthesis of arts and architecture, moving away from architects, who he saw as “imitating the artist and their creativity,” and returning instead to “painting with renewed vigour” and hunger for geometric abstraction’s “honesty.” It was this attitude from which the Coloritmos [Colorhythms] were born.
Though often articulated by abstractionists themselves as being “apolitical” or aspiring to an art outside of the political sphere, it is essential to note that in an artistic shirk of politicised ideals, subjects, or idealisations - and a relentless pursuit of an “honesty” or inherent “truth” in non objectivity - abstract art is indeed a political statement of dissonance.
Venezuela achieved independence from European occupation relatively early in 1810 compared to neighboring countries, yet bore nearly a hundred years of brutal warfare under the regimes of successive dictatorships before democratic stability was reached in 1960. Stemming from this context of autocratic censorship and political upheaval locally, a social mood of anxiety for global visibility arose. Spurred on in addition by intoxicating currents of global modernisation, industrialisation, and narratives of progress, Otero and other Venezuelan modernists were intensely motivated to achieve credit for their artistic ingenuity; to struggle for novelty amidst the reclaiming of an oppressed cultural tradition, and a bold re-formation of national identity.
Figure 3: Alejandro Otero, Coloritmo 41, 1959, Duco paint on wood, 200 x 59cm. Colección Ella Fontanals-Cisneros; copyright Alejandro Otero Estate.
In summation, returning once more to Venezuela’s local light, Otero’s Coloritmos (c.f. Coloritmo 41, fig. 3.) can be described as arising from both a “brief but intense flirtation with architecture,” and the blinding light of the tropics. His indirect reference to the local Caracas sky remains as a feature in his work, forming a “key architectural intervention” despite his abandonment of form in preference of colour and kinetic motion. The Coloritmos as a series exude sonorous, bordering synaesthetic, energies. Their vibrancy, owing in part to his childhood experience of Venezuela’s solar strength, endows the fractured geometries with motion and reflectivity despite their uniformly applied colour bands. Shifting optically before our very eyes, the diagonal emphases seen in his earlier studies like Estudio 2 is taken even further to flex optically as the viewer orbits the work in situ. Further still, his novel approach specifically excludes framing – every strip of the Colorhythms falls just short of the white backdrop so as to create a border, and emphasise their serial verticality, extending the appearance each work to incorporate the white wall within a rhythm. Otero does not define what he intends by “pure colour;” and it is a term that has been used in many ways – but his writings seem to indicate that it was “equivalent to colours on the light spectrum” and thus, perhaps is indeed rooted in light like Castro suggested, and our individual perception of its rays.
Vibrantly geometric, multi-dimensional, and transnational; Otero unshackles colour from its representational relationship to form. His abstractions resonate both locally, and globally, expressing participation in broader transnational modernist currents, whilst grounding his artworks in Venezuelan contextuality. Expressed chromatically through his experimental attitude toward viewer autonomy, a democratic statement of dissidence is posed.
Bibliography
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