Mariano Otero, a Spanish painter born in Madrid in August 1942 and who died in Rennes on July 9, 2019, listened to a lot of tango when he was a kid, and never forgot its tunes and dances, its words and its colors.
Solitude, uprootedness, but also social justice and revolt—all these themes have been dear to him following the exile of his father in 1947, a republican writer and journalist forced to flee Franco's regime. It wasn't until 1956 that the Otero family joined him in Rennes, when Mariano was 14 years old.
Ink on paper, line drawings in pencil, pastels on paper: for around ten years, Mariano Otero painted, in various formats, the dancing couple, the tanguera putting her shoe back on, the entwining of bodies, the sound of the bandoneon, etc.
“My attraction to tango goes back a long way. My mother, who danced it very well in her youth, sang the words of Carlos Gardel to me as a child… Tango was in me and the turning point happened in November 1994… Since then, I have been revolving around tango.”
