The artist’s dreamlike paintings, inspired by his childhood home, led to a collaboration with a global pop icon. Now he’s opening a casita in Bruton – what will the locals think?
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ngel Otero is on the brink of tears. He’s describing the feeling of being part of fellow Puerto Rican artist Bad Bunny’s La Casita – a set the musician used on stage during his 31-show residency on the island last year, a recreation of a typical single-storey home found across Puerto Rico and the wider Latin American diaspora.
“When I was invited, of course, I accepted,” Otero tells me, standing in his temporary studio in Somerset. “Although I tend to shy away from things like that. The replica is a very similar setting to the one I grew up in, and I had multiple feelings when I got there. Of course, there’s the spectacle of being on the stage of a significant artist of our time, who is from my island. But it also transported me into the subject I’ve been working on for so long. It was a sort of validation, seeing people enjoying the culture, people specifically from my kind of upbringing.”
Otero, 45, was born in the Santurce neighbourhood of San Juan, the Puerto Rican capital, “literally facing the ocean”. Santurce has since been gentrified, but in the 1980s his grandmother Maria Luisa – who Otero grew up with – experienced a series of robberies. The family built a home above Otero’s mother’s apartment in Bayamón for her, where Otero spent most of his childhood while his mother worked in a full-time job at a bank. “I grew up with women – the men all left early.”
