Juan Uslé, brushstrokes like heartbeats

Madrid,

This year Juan Uslé turns seventy. He was born in Santander but went to study in Fine Arts at the San Carlos School in Valencia and, in this city, he discovered that other light, different and complementary to that of the north, which had to do with with other feelings and even with other perspectives of culture. At that stage he alternated the practice of painting and photography, which was part of his recent exhibition “De luz y sangre” at the Sala Verónicas in Murcia and which he conceives as a territory especially open to subjectivity and experimentation. but upon his return to Cantabria he affirmed his desire to focus on canvases, a commitment confirmed in the eighties by successive scholarships and by his establishment in New York, in that same decade and together with Victoria Civera (there he continues to maintain a studio).

A set of his recent works can be seen until November at the Elvira González Gallery, in “Ojos en la doubt”, which is his first individual in this space since the firm began to represent him a few months ago. His creations have been framed in the so-called New Abstraction, a kind of extension of American post-pictorial Abstraction, which favored openness or clarity in opposition to the dense surfaces of the abstract expressionists and which did not imply, unlike their compositions, mystical or religious messages, but claimed its own existence through solid, absolute chromatic zones, and not shapes.

Juan Uslé. Eyes in doubt. Elvira González Gallery

Uslé’s abstractions, for their part, have combined geometry and line as the backbone with a lyricism linked, more than to concrete personal experiences, to very particular ways of experiencing time and night (with their own light and a moon that understands very evocative); In short, in ways of addressing the most routine circumstances for everyone: the pieces that make up some of his most recent series, significantly titled Dawn, Sleeplessness, Dreams, I dreamed that you revealed either The censored gardenseem to oscillate between lightness and darkness, in a transition that this author equates to human movements in that same direction. Some of them arose more or less instinctively, in rapid pulses, and others derived from more meticulous and reflective processes, from careful looks. Furthermore, several of these series clearly led him to the others, because Uslé works more by allowing himself to be guided by the future of his painting practice (sometimes, with a lot of physiology) than by imposing previous directions on himself.

Along with this inspiration that comes from the nocturnal, another fundamental note present in much of Uslé’s recent and previous production is the rhythms and beats, the pulsations that connect his work with life itself, in an organic and temporal sense, and that make these paintings detached experiences on canvas; experiences that, more than emotional, we can understand as physical: we talk about breathing or heartbeat.

Uslé usually refers to these fabrics as contaminated abstractionconsidering that there is no greater purity than that which can be interpreted as absolute contamination of formal and mental references; The signs and gestures that populate his images seem static, but they are manifestations of what incessantly mutates or fades, like the light that penetrates through a skylight or the vague sounds of the night. The viewer will be able to perceive that it seeks to capture the transition from light to dark and the ways in which both soak the colors; The artist tends to accentuate these dualities, also in the photographs that we had the opportunity to see in Murcia last year.

These latest works are also testimonies of the formal simplification towards which his painting has moved, smoothing the transition of his canvases towards an ever greater depth, to the convergence of the hermetic or opaque and the recognizable, favoring a continuous interrogation of the pictorial medium itself in relation to the mystery of what the eye can or cannot glimpse.

This exhibition coincides in Madrid with the presentation at the Reina Sofía Museum of an extensive retrospective of Soledad Sevilla, who was also inspired at night by very different abstractions that are worth comparing: her series Insomnia arose from the purpose of capturing, also in large format, not the thoughts that go through his head when he cannot sleep, but what he finds in his mind before those daily concerns appear. He did it, in the early 2000s, in vibrant accumulations of leaves in shades of white, black, gray and some occasional red, with soft lights among the general darkness.