Alejandro Otero

In his Colorhythm series, Otero, an artist central to the development of abstraction in Venezuela, marked the first in-depth exploration of a repeating and abstract serial motif by a Latin American artist. Over the course of seventy-five paintings, he manipulated the same basic elements: brightly colored shapes and alternating light and dark bands. In Colorhythm, 1, irregularly shaped planes of color seem to float out toward the edges of the painting and beyond, making the white bands read as a deep, continuous void, even as they alternate with the dark ones to generate a visual surface flicker. To see the colored shapes glide, float, and sink against the regular repetitions of the bands requires active looking.

The series came out of Otero’s interest in architecture, which had informed his previous works. The glossy enamel paint creates dynamic surfaces that seem to expand outward, pulsating into their surroundings in what the artist called “an open directional rhythm.” With this effect, Otero hoped to create his own architectural space. Through their relationship to real space and their perceptual play, Colorhythm, 1 and the subsequent works in the series extend abstraction beyond aesthetics and into the social realm.