"Mon Cher Ami:"
Alejandro Otero
Venezuelan, 1921–1990
January 17, 1962
A painted wood panel in which Otero has attached old handwritten papers and a torn leather scrap, using industrial paint, paper, and leather to turn ordinary correspondence into a composed, object-like painting.
A pale, scraped wooden ground holds three overlapping, tea-stained letters whose looping script, stamped seals, and watermarks read as tactile texture, while a dark leather fragment anchors the lower edge like a heavy punctuation.
By integrating found paper and leather into the painted field, Otero blurs painting and objecthood and links Venezuelan modernist abstraction to international assemblage experiments, expanding how mid‑20th‑century art thought about materiality, memory, and the everyday.
Medium
Industrial paint, paper, and leather on wood
Dimensions
23 1/4 × 20 1/8 × 1 1/4" (59 × 51.1 × 3.2 cm)
Classification
Department
Credit
Gift of Patricia Phelps de Cisneros through the Latin American and Caribbean Fund
Accession
857.2016
Palette
Art Terms
Exhibitions
