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Alejandro Otero. Ortogonal (Collage) 1 Alejandro Otero. Ortogonal (Collage) 1 . 1951. © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/OCTO_a_00217 by guest on 28 September 2021 Alejandro Otero’s Polychrome: Color between Nature and Abstraction* MEGAN SULLIVAN In October 1951, Ellsworth Kelly and Alejandro Otero, young expat artists frequenting the same Parisian circles, both began constructing gridded collages of industrially produced colored papers. Although meant simply as provisional studies for new ways of arranging color, these collages mark important turning points in the trajectory of each artist’s work. Kelly’s collages would lead later that year to Colors for a Large Wall , a large grid composed of sixty-four brightly colored panels arranged by chance. In retrospect, this work stands as an early harbinger of two key developments in both Kelly’s work and in postwar painting in the United States in general: the substitution of color as commodity for the historical avant- garde’s spiritual and scientific theories, and a final effort to reengage with avant-garde aspirations to architectural integration and collective reception (aspi - rations that Kelly and other artists of the 1950s would quickly abandon). In those humble collages of industrial color lay the seeds of a radically new and disen - chanted approach to postwar abstraction. Otero had great admiration for Kelly during their time together in France (referring to him as “the most mature among us”), but the Venezuelan’s collages were driven by a different set of concerns and would lead in quite a different direc - tion. 1 For Otero, as for Kelly, these works represent his earliest efforts to experiment with non-referential, industrial color and the grid as a non-mimetic organizational matrix for color. Yet upon his return to Caracas in early 1952, Otero would forsake his painting practice for several years in order to dedicate himself entirely to collabo - rating on the new, modernist building programs sprouting up throughout the city. Throwing himself into the creation of public spaces, he also moved away from the non-referential colors of his Parisian work. While inspired by the gridded collages, Otero’s 1956 monumental polychrome façade for the Faculty of Architecture in * My profound thanks Benjamin Buchloh for his input and support through several drafts of this essay, and to Robin Greeley and Tom Cummins for their guidance and insights. 1. Rachel Adler and Alejandro Otero, “An Interview with Alejandro Otero by Rachel Adler,” in Alejandro Otero: A Retrospective Exhibition , exh. cat. (Austin, TX: Michener Galleries, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, 1975), p. 19. It is unclear exactly how well Otero and Kelly were acquaint - ed; Otero mentions Kelly on occasion in his letters from the time, and Kelly sent works to the inaugur - al exhibition at the Venezuelan gallery Cuatro Muros in 1952, but language barriers likely prevented any sustained exchange. OCTOBER 152, Spring 2015, pp. 60 –81. © 2015 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/OCTO_a_00217 by guest on 28 September 2021 62 OCTOBER Ellsworth Kelly. Colors for a Large Wall . 1951. © Ellsworth Kelly. Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art. Caracas’s newly constructed University City (his self-declared greatest achievement among these interventions) makes an explicit nod to the color of the work’s immedi - ate natural surroundings; he chose the lighter of the work’s massive grid of alternating blues, constructed of industrially produced glass mosaic tiles, to coincide with the brilliant hue of the Caracas sky at certain times of the day and year. The ambiguity of this interplay with the environment—reinforced concrete is optically dissolved while the sky is marshaled into a rigid grid structure—points to larger ten - sions between raw materials and finished products, and even nature and history, that characterized Venezuela’s efforts to forge a modern art that was at once national and up to date. In Otero’s façade, color emerged as a potential way of bridging the nat - ural world—the source of the nation’s emerging oil wealth—and the advanced technologies and consumer products into which the state sought to convert that oil. Whereas Kelly’s adoption of an anti-aesthetic approach to color would continue upon his return to the United States and would foretell color’s complete break with its earlier grounding in nature, Otero’s homecoming inspired him to put color back in dialogue with nature. The result was an approach to color that embraced its inevitable industrialization even while refusing to sever its natural referents. For Otero, I will argue, color became a way of reconciling the historical rifts endemic both to the experience of colonialism and to Venezuela’s particular form of postwar de vel op men talism. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/OCTO_a_00217 by guest on 28 September 2021 Otero’s Polychrome 63 A Return to Local Color When Otero returned to Caracas after more than six years abroad, he found a country in the midst of transformation. Venezuela had remained a largely rural, agri - cultural country well into the twentieth century, but the military government that came into power in 1948 initiated a concerted effort to convert Venezuela’s newfound oil wealth into the visible trappings of modernity. The University City, for which Otero’s polychrome work would be created, was begun in the early 1940s, a few years before the government of General Marcos Pérez Jiménez took control, but it nonetheless stands, in the words of Luis Pérez-Oramas, as a fitting emblem of the hopes and failures of Venezuela’s “will to be modern” that defined the 1950s. 2 Designed by architect Carlos Raúl Villanueva as the campus for the Universidad Central de Venezuela and built between 1944 and 1977, the city within a city represents one of the more successful attempts to adapt International Style architecture to tropical climates and stands as a tes - tament to the mid-century dream (which cut across the political spec - trum) of imposing modernity on underdeveloped nations through planning. The project is perhaps most celebrated as an accomplished Top: Carlos Raúl Villanueva and 2. Luis Enrique Pérez-Oramas, “La Alejandro Otero (facade). School of voluntad moderna,” in Carlos Raúl Villanueva, Architecture, Universidad Central de un moderno en Sudamérica, ed. William Niño Venezuela, Caracas. 1952 –60. Ararque (Caracas: Galería de Arte Nacional, Photograph by Paolo Gasparini. Courtesy 1999), n.p. of Fundación Villanueva, Caracas. Bottom: Villanueva and Otero. School of Architecture, Universidad Central de Venezuela, Caracas. 1952 –60. Photograph by Megan Sullivan. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/OCTO_a_00217 by guest on 28 September 2021 64 OCTOBER example of the synthesis of the arts, of which Villanueva was an enthusiastic advo - cate. Artists from throughout Europe and the Americas, including Jean Arp, Alexander Calder, Fernand Léger, Antoine Pevsner, and Victor Vasarely, con - tributed sculptures and murals, while the Venezuelan artists who had worked with Villanueva on his Corbusian residential complexes also designed glass mosaic poly - chromes for the buildings’ façades. Otero’s work for the School of Architecture consisted of two monumental designs for the blind east and west façades, as well as repeated black and white stripes throughout smaller sections of the exterior. The west façade—the primary focus of this study—is covered by a regular, eight-by- eight grid; in each row, the two shades of blue alternate, either module by module or, in alternating rows, doubled into paired modules of the same color. 3 The four top rows begin with the lighter tiles on the left extreme and end with the dark ones; the pattern is inverted for the bottom four. The subtle directional rhythm of the repeated pattern disturbs the regularity of the modular grid, lending a sense of movement to the static architectural form. In analyzing Otero’s earlier poly - chrome in red, green, and blue for the residential housing block El Paraíso, Juan Ledezma contends that the rhythm of color forces “the fixity of structure” to yield to the “temporal distention of the event.” 4 Ledezma’s argument deftly accounts for the relation between the optical rhythms of color and the architectural object, but how does the presence of a third element—color’s natural referent—compli - cate the picture? The significance of the polychrome for the Faculty of Architecture’s color lies in the unique co-presence of sign and referent—the proximity of bright blue sky and blue mosaic tiles. Mimicking on the façade the segment of the sky that the building obscures, the blue tiles both represent and replace the environment. On the one hand, the concrete building seems to dissolve under the intense light and color of the tropical sun, as if overpowered by natural forces. On the other hand, nature retreats from view, transformed into concrete color. In both cases, the blues function indexically, pointing to their referent only within the precise con - text of their enunciation. These blues are thus emphatically local, circumscribing their meaning to the act of referencing. Otero, then, would seem to have aban - doned the non-referential color of the Parisian collages, as well as the universalizing aspirations of his Parisian project, in an act of concession to the overwhelming color and light of the tropics. His acknowledgment through color of the intensity of that blue sky further underscored Villanueva’s references to tropical reality in the form of covered walkways, interior courtyards, and brise- soleil. The reflection of intense tropical light in the glass tiles (used throughout 3. The east façade bears the same pattern of alternating blues, but an external staircase run - ning up the left side interrupts the pattern.
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