Speaking of Seeing: Remember

Following my recent visit to Hauser and Wirth Somerset, photographer Bill Wadman and I discuss the work of Angel Otero whose exhibition 'Agua Salada' is running until October'26. During a three-month residency at the Somerset site, Otero produced a body of paintings that combine a powerful sense of memory, belonging, and identity with a challenge to the parameters of materiality. Using a unique system of painting onto flexiglass and transfering skins of paint in a collage-like process in layers, the work reveals itself to the audience through Otero's interventions of peeling, scraping, and patching, acting as physical manifestation of expressive storytelling. The work has a profound joyousness as much as an uncanny pathos, the melancholy of life as memory becoming itself a memory of the exhibition. In describing the work, I wonder how the act of audience and the notion of legacy create a remembering that borrows from a past the viewer does not know. As with any visual art, Bill and I question the position of image in the mind of an experiencer who believes themselves to be present. Otero's work brings a vibrancy to his personal history, whilst universalising a human condition to remember. How grateful I am to have discovered his work. With thanks, too, to Bill for his ongoing support of the Speaking of Seeing project.