Angel Otero (b. 1981, Santurce, Puerto Rico; lives and works in Brooklyn, NY) is best known for his process-based paintings, collages, and sculptural works that venerate the inherent qualities of his material of choice, oil paint. Employing various methods of collage, Otero explores the potential for abstraction to meaningfully engage memory and identity using line, form, and color. Through a methodically innovative process, the artist paints representationally onto large sheets of glass, scrapes the partially dried oil paint from the surface, and then reassembles the resulting “skins” into multi-layered compositions. In this way, the paint itself emerges as a crucial conceptual component, mobilizing ideas of chance, conveyance, and aesthetic vernacular, while the images and themes it visualizes become fragments or parts of a history energized by the material. Much of Otero’s early work was directly influenced by personal memories based on photographs and other family memorabilia combined with the gestures of painters such as Nicolas Poussin, Pablo Picasso, and Willem de Kooning. Instead of representing his life through art, he archives moments within it through a constant negotiation between lived experience and art historical references.