"Mon Cher Ami:"

Alejandro Otero

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.

Palette

Art Terms

Painting Assemblage Collage Found object Ephemera Enamel paint Abstraction

Exhibitions

Latin-American Art, 1931–1966, from the Museum Collection

1967

The Artist as His Subject

1967

Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art

1940

The Museum Collection of Painting

1946