At Hauser & Wirth Somerset, Angel Otero infuses paintings with a dreamy magical realism

Angel Otero treats paint as material. The Puerto Rican artist, long based in New York and now returned home, pushes the medium to its limit, layering paint then scraping and peeling and re-layering for densely textured surfaces that sit between abstraction and figuration. His is a deeply personal practice that works with memory and place.

‘Agua Salada’ (Salt Water) at Hauser & Wirth Somerset, the artist’s first UK showing, provided the opportunity to explore these concepts further. For six weeks, he was in residence at Durslade Farm, working from a temporary studio there. The result is a moving journey through time, through memories real or imagined, the ocean he was born from and remains attached to, the people who shaped him, and language. What it means to move and dream between Spanish and English.

‘I have come to understand place as a living presence within the work – not merely a backdrop but a condition that shapes perception,’ he explains. ‘Every environment holds a quiet residue of light, architecture, weather and history.’ He says changing his surroundings can stir certain memories, elements which surface through process rather than depiction. ‘The studio becomes porous, and what lies beyond inevitably seeps into the painting.’

‘Agua Salada’ opens across the converted farm galleries, and with an outdoor sculpture set into the inner cloister courtyard. The saltwater of the title carries several meanings: as the ocean, a horizon of origin and return; as chemistry, the slow dissolution of one substance into another; and as affect, sting and salve. Familiar motifs – doors, bedframes, pianos, clocks – recur across his work as portals between memory and now, and stand-ins for the people who once lived alongside them. Collectively, they speak to how place and family leave mineral traces on us, how grievance can crystallise into identity, and how nostalgia can be both comfort and constraint.

Otero was born in Santurce, in San Juan, in 1981 and trained at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is best known for his ongoing Oil Skin series which began in 2010 whereby paint is layered onto glass, left to dry partway, peeled off in a single sheet, and recomposed on canvas as a new image and a new pattern.

Across the galleries at Hauser & Wirth, the work is dreamlike, sometimes haunting, with a sense of magical realism. Family photographs surface throughout, often only just visible, collaged at the edge of recognition. In ‘A Sailor Before the Mirror’ (2026) Otero takes on portraiture, painting himself as a child held by his grandmother, the two figures tenderly merging into a wave. ‘I see the photo as an object itself,’ he says. When most photographs live on phones, the printed photograph becomes a thing held, kept, left behind for someone else to find.

Otero speaks of his visceral connection to the ocean. For the artist, the sea embodies beauty and terror, its unpredictability and vastness reflecting the instability of memory itself. The sea is also where his godmother, whom he was very close to, lives in his memory. She died a few years ago, and Otero had carried a story about her final days in which she had asked her family to take her to the beach, to sit her in front of the ocean. But then recently, when he asked his cousin about this story, she told him his godmother had been too unwell to be moved. Instead, she had spent her last days listening to recordings of the sound of the sea in her bedroom. Otero has chosen to keep both versions, and the ocean in ‘Agua Salada’ carries this double exposure – what happened and we choose to remember.

His father appears too, through the figure of his grandfather and a small population of crabs. In Puerto Rico the land crab is a delicacy. When Otero’s father became ill, he moved in with his grandfather, who kept these crabs on the balcony. The crabs though, losing their bearings, kept finding their way inside the house with the two men spending their evenings shooing them back out. ‘There was a connection,’ Otero smiles, ‘between these two lonely men living together with these crabs – a beautiful metaphor.’

His grandmother lived in the apartment above his mother's house – in Puerto Rico, middle-class families often build a second floor for older generations to keep them close. Since she passed, his mother has kept the gate locked, cleaning the rooms occasionally and pulling the gate closed again. The outdoor sculpture ‘Dreams and Salt’ (2025/2026) holds this idea of partly entered rooms; of places one moves towards without arriving. He says the portal is about self, the need to escape, the wish to return to where one feels one should be.

Otero shot his first film, showing at H&A, mostly inside his grandmother’s house. The narrative is non-linear, the voiceover is his own, in Spanish. ‘There is a tone and a pace to the way I’m saying things in Spanish. When I create in Spanish, the voice changes, and takes on something more romantic,’ Otero explains. He returns, in the end, to water. ‘I speak to myself in the ocean,’ he says. ‘When you put your ears under the water, everything quietens, and you can hum and speak to yourself. I speak in Spanish.’

Angel Otero ‘Agua Salada’ is at Hauser & Wirth Somerset until 18 October 2026