If, as we have seen lately, the Velázquez Prize was not dedicated to the political fabrication of a purely governmental art, a painter like Juan Uslé would have already received it a long time ago (and much earlier, of course, Cristino de Vera, José María Yturralde or Aurèlia Muñoz). The great exhibition, a summary of 30 years of painting, magnificently curated by Ángel Calvo Ulloa, puts before our eyes evidence that, apparently, it is in vain to try to explain to those who do not perceive it. As if that were not enough, a while of chatting with Uslé himself reveals unmistakable signs: his reading of Velázquez, solitary bird or his taste for the painting of Ortega Muñoz (and for that of o , naturally) only ratify the certainty of finding ourselves before the other art, true art.
After the mid-eighties, the rescued painting began to become too stylized. Uslé then presented herself with dense and gloomy canvases, and above all loaded with materials. El Elorrioan old cargo ship that was swallowed by the twisting sea right at the foot of the Cantabrian coast next to which he lived as a child, has always been with him. But I could no longer know if it was, in fact, a memory: the ship, the night, the silhouettes of the helpless neighbors on the edge of the cliffs, the roar of the storm, passed onto the flat surface of the press images. And that kind of transfiguration of memory into graphic forms has also always been part of the complication of his visions. The meager apartment he shared with Vicky Civera when they were studying in Valencia required its compatibility as a bedroom and photographic laboratory—red light bulb, walls painted black. And photography will, finally, Dolca Line (2008-2018) the prominence given to him by a hunter of street images surprisingly related to his own paintings (not the other way around).
These paintings were soon organized into something that were not exactly series (the curator and the artist call them, much better, “families”): Nemo, Nemasté, In Urbania, Río Cubas… And so on, until we reach Soñé que revealas, titled in memory of that episode and extended from 1997 to today with some of his most characteristic paintings: horizontal bands, the light ink that slides with the stroke of a button, large formats, monotony, the shine of aluminum and graphite. But Uslé’s creative economy also has another pattern.
Since that first Madrid at the Montenegro gallery, his work suggests that of a diary in which personal experiences—transcendent or trivial, but always concrete—are recorded in variations that, ideally, have no end, like those of music, despite the fact that its elements are, in reality, a few, as in an alphabet. First came the boat and the mountain. Then, the drastic move to New York did not have an immediate resonance in the paintings, the ship and the mountain remained for a while. Later, the painter who contemplated the storm and the catastrophe was forced to immerse himself in a new enveloping reality that no longer allowed contemplation, and in which he could only hear, like the diver in his diving suit, his own heartbeat. Meanwhile, the paintings lost weight, material, so to speak they began to liquefy.
The opening to the vertigo of the sleepless city came. The interposed image would then be the Broadway Boogie-Woogiefrom the New Yorker. By the way, the grid in which Rosalind Krauss wanted to see the emblem of avant-garde purity led Uslé to very different, in fact opposite, ports. On the one hand, strangely heterogeneous works appeared, without family, as if by different painters—the wonderful set of Singles—, and on the other, tangles of algae, networks and circuits also similar to those of other artists, be it Gordillo or Jonathan Lasker.
In New York he immerses himself in a new reality that no longer allows him contemplation. He only hears his own heartbeat
By then, Uslé was already Uslé. He had brilliantly broken into the (especially IX, 1992), the best museums had dedicated major exhibitions to him, the prestigious glosses were innumerable. But that late nineties was an uncertain time. Upon emerging from the depths, the world he found before him was the complete opposite of the one he came from, it was, to say it with Ignacio Castro (Anthropophobia2024), “the ideal temple of fluidity and commercial nothingness”, what has been called “the deep boredom” of a reality in which the physical experience of flesh, earth and water – and painting – has been abrogated by the technological fluidity, without obstacles, of the equal and the smooth. Over the slow brown river, the painter saw a time reverberate without “earthly ties.” But none of this would come up if we were not, precisely, in front of one of the most painterly painters we can find. That is, someone for whom this rootedness in the physical sensitivity of painting and life is inalienable.
I don’t know if it was Ross Bleckner (or perhaps ) who observed how vulnerable abstract purity could be to the tremor and heat of referential forms: the beach, the bodies, the cliffs, the river among the brañas. Uslé was born in a substantially analog world (if this were not a redundancy); that is, irregular, stained and abrupt, with the skin and senses marked by grass and wood. Well, although all that had to be erased—for pure survival—on the other side of the ocean, the painting that embodies it never has been. Amnesia It is titled a key work from 1992 and appears under some others.
However, it is precisely there, between the horizontal bands that evoke that world activated without interruption by wired flows, where the painter-very-painter offers us – pay close attention to his visit – the groove of a slight sliding of the brush, the human color that is transparent under the surface. They are minimal accidents through which life sneaks in, the testimony of an art that resists.
‘Juan Uslé. That ship in the mountain’. Reina Sofia Museum. Madrid. Until April 20, 2026.
