For Angel Otero, beauty is a word ever present in his art dictionary. His attitude toward art is distinctly two- sided. He struggles with it harder than most, but also appreciates art more than most. Angel Otero's works reflect this complexity with multiple images conveyed in each work he has created. The final touches to his works are in the form of abstract painting. Surprisingly, he had clearly worked figuratively before. Multiple images are overlapped as layers on top of one another, as a strata. He uses a large plexiglass sheet as a canvas, laying it down and drawing his first picture. Each layer, each image certainly has a form of sorts, from a portrait of someone to a still life, an abstract, maybe even a work by an admired painter or a scene from his memory. Angel Otero is always thinking about what he would draw next. He borrows references from scenes that suit his intentions best in terms of color and concept. After the painting is almost dried, he scratches away chunks to create what he calls "oil skin". His work is finalized when those pieces of skin are collaged. This oil-skin becomes a layer, and through it the images are overlapped, completed as a true abstract painting. Each of his works created this way take up a different amount of time. He works on multiple works in parallel, rather than completing one and moving on to another. His time and efforts are dispersed across multiple works at any given time.
The reason behind his particular means of creation can be traced back to some strong words by his professors. Otero tells that he was highly satisfied with his paintings from college days, but his professors criticized them for being unoriginal and imitative of certain works by certain artists. Such assessments pushed him to question the means to paint something that none have seen before. While in school, he began removing portions of the paintings that professors had pointed out to be unoriginal. He started over, from reconstructing his memories using the layers of paint which had accrued on his palette. His earliest works had a clear subject, which he described as scenes in recollection. Thereon in, his works gradually developed abstractly. As a result, the artist creates abstractions, but adds a narrative aspect to them to imbue a figurative sense to them. He shares that most of his stories rely on memories of his childhood spent in his grandmother's house in Puerto Rico. Childhood memories of grandmother's house projected upon his creations are one of the most noticeable factors in his works. Immortalized photographs, grandmother's fence, balcony, plates, and messy table offer something to look back on, to discover a pattern he had not seen before and present as a work of art.
This approach comes across as a mixture of what he feels comfortable with (painting), and the awkward and uncomfortable (criticism). He pays homage in his own way, to his admired maestros Pablo Picasso and William de Kooning, using their masterpieces as reference, reconstructing them into new and original abstractions even though he does not directly mention that he refers their name in his work.