Juan UslĂŠ membrana porosa
Juan UslĂŠ membrana porosa
CHEIM & READ
Chasing Shadows: New Paintings by Juan Uslé Thomas Micchelli
J
uan Uslé remembers everything about the first movie he ever saw, except the plot. His family, having traveled seven kilometers to the cinema by horse
cart from their village on the northeast coast of Spain, arrived late to the show, and the only empty seats were in the first row, crammed up against the screen.
Perched at such a skewed angle, all young Juan could absorb from
that alien, disorienting experience were the sounds of the actors’ voices and the onrushing, flickering shadows on the screen. He sat and gazed upward, awestruck, until the film broke and burned.1
Continuity and discontinuity, light and shadow, surface and space are
the drivers of Uslé’s inimitable body of work. Rhythmic sequences move regularly but not uniformly in bands across the breadth of the canvas— first forward, then backward, then forward again, in gradations from dark to light as the pigment empties from the brush.
It is well known to anyone who has followed Uslé’s work that the
short, broad brushstrokes that make up these bands are based on the artist’s pulse; in an interview with John Yau for the Brooklyn Rail, the artist describes his “sequential field or territory of marks” as a “cardiogram.” 2 If so, it is a cardiogram that is ruptured, torn, and tattered, like that longlost film.
The pulses are the dominant force in many of Uslé’s works,
including the large paintings collectively known as Soñe que revelabas
(I Dreamt that You Revealed), which were begun in 1997. The Soñe que revelabas paintings are individuated not by a numbering system but by parenthetical subtitles named after the great rivers of the world, such as Columbia, Nilo Azul, and Ganges.
Geography was Uslé’s favorite subject at school, and he recalls
taking many “imaginary voyages” as he pored over the pictures and maps in his textbooks. When he was growing up, Uslé’s parents, who worked on the grounds of the local convent, gave him and his brother free rein to roam wherever they wanted, except near the river that cut through the surrounding countryside: a forbidden territory where fresh water mixed with the salty backwash of the nearby sea.3
Uslé mixes his own paint, spooning pigment into a bowl, then stirring
in acrylic medium thinned with water and a few drops of dispersion liquid. It is a process that deliberately produces sediment at the bottom of the bowl as the granules of pigment settle. The artist sinks his brush into the deposit as if dredging a riverbed, drawing out the densely packed particles, sometimes coating his entire brush, and sometimes going only halfway, depending on the type of mark he wishes to make.
The bowls of paint are not unlike the aqueous colors used by fresco
painters, and Uslé handles his medium with the vibrant immediacy of a Renaissance master running his brush over damp plaster. His materials practice, from start to finish, verges on the ritualistic. He first primes the canvas with multiple layers of his own customized gesso, attaining a satiny smoothness that allows for complete control over the stroke. More importantly, the polished surface prevents the paint from soaking into the weave, permitting maximum translucency. Thus the gesso ground is readable at every stage of the painting.
The continuous manifestation of the gesso also conveys a
philosophical resonance for Uslé; namely, that the beginning is present at the end, that the painting is a self-contained entity, a complete object, not merely within its four sides but in the vertical layering of its surface as well. As light travels through the filmic skin of the paint—the membrana porosa—it bounces off the lustrous surface of the gesso, illuminating the image from behind, like a movie projector.
When first introduced to fast, low-light film, Uslé—who is also an
accomplished photographer—was fascinated by the graininess flecked through the lighted areas of pictures taken in near-total darkness. It suggested a material presence even in light, a correlative to the granules of pigment suspended in his homemade paint.
Spread across the canvas, the granules take on a life of their own,
swimming in the short, tight waves of the brushstrokes, grouping into unpredictable patterns and gradations, and streaking into ghost-lines paralleling the direction of the sequenced rivers of color.
The breaks in these rhythms—the ruptures in the cardiograms—
can be harsh, lyrical, or matter-of-fact. They might be as understated as the stripes separating the repeated bands of strokes in Uslé’s smallscale In Kayak paintings, whose subtitles bear the names of lakes. But almost invariably the stripes in these works are mottled with opaque layers of color that set up a distinct contrast with the translucent, primarily monochromatic pulses. Often these interventions are painted with a jagged edge, a hint of violence that resembles a piece of snapped, serrated celluloid.
In other paintings, especially the monumental Soñe que revelabas
works, the breaks between the rhythmic bands can be much more drastic,
filled with aberrant, twisting forms that feel like interceptions from an antipodal universe. But they can also be rigorously geometric, as in Soñe que revelabas (Nilo Azul) (2015), in which rows of steely aquamarine strokes occupy the top third of the image, and sequences of raw umber take up much of the lower half. Separating them are three large black rectangles, which are narrowly divided by two-toned, mullion-like vertical bars, with the aquamarine seeping down from the top and the umber creeping up from the bottom.
Nilo Azul is Spanish for “Blue Nile,” a river in Ethiopia and one of
the two major tributaries constituting the legendary source of the Nile— the subject of fascination for emperors and kings over the centuries. The paradox of this painting and the others in which the artist’s pulse plays a major role, is that the strokes, which move from dark to light as the color drains from the brush, are read as light receding into darkness, chasing shadows, drawn into the mystery of what cannot be seen.
The darkness of a movie theater, suddenly illuminated by the rapid-
fire click, click, click of the projector; a brush lifted from rich deposits of pigment and touched to the surface, its mark incrementally variegated and lightened via the rhythms of the artist’s heartbeat; and then the rupture, the shot of color, the invasive, contorted shape: as Uslé’s clockwork intensity terminates at the canvas edge, the physical limit of its formal logic, his metaphors transcend the boundaries of the art object—the particulates of memory and history suspended in pools of shadow and light.
Juan Uslé, interview with the author, March 30, 2016. John Yau, “In Conversation: Juan Uslé with John Yau,” Brooklyn Rail, April 2011, 35. 3 Uslé. 1 2
Pulso roto 2016 vinyl, dispersion and dry pigment on canvas 24 x 22 in 61 x 55.9 cm
In Kayak (Atacama) 2016 vinyl, dispersion and dry pigment on canvas 18 x 12 in 45.7 x 30.5 cm
Crossing Beats 2016 vinyl, dispersion and dry pigment on canvas 24 x 22 in 61 x 55.9 cm
So単e que revelabas (Colorado) 2016 vinyl, dispersion and dry pigment on canvas 120 x 89 1/4 in 304.8 x 226.7 cm
El jardĂn cerrado 2016 vinyl, dispersion and dry pigment on canvas 24 x 22 in 61 x 55.9 cm
So単e que revelabas (Mackenzie) 2015 vinyl, dispersion, acrylic and dry pigment on canvas 108 x 80 in 274.3 x 203.2 cm
Invierno (Winter) 2016 vinyl, dispersion and dry pigment on canvas 18 x 12 in 45.7 x 30.5 cm
In Kayak (Aral 3) 2014 vinyl, dispersion and dry pigment on canvas 18 x 12 in 45.7 x 30.5 cm
So単e que revelabas (Columbia) 2015 vinyl, dispersion, acrylic and dry pigment on canvas 108 x 80 1/4 in 274.3 x 203.8 cm
So単e que revelabas (Ganges) 2016 vinyl, dispersion and dry pigment on canvas 108 x 80 in 274.3 x 203.2 cm
Los pies y la ventana 2016 vinyl, dispersion and dry pigment on canvas 24 x 22 in 61 x 55.9 cm
So単e que revelabas (Nilo Azul) 2015 vinyl, dispersion, acrylic and dry pigment on canvas 108 1/2 x 80 in 275.6 x 203.2 cm
FrĂo dentro 2016 vinyl, dispersion and dry pigment on canvas 24 x 22 in 61 x 55.9 cm
Hilo y sombra 2015–16 vinyl, dispersion and dry pigment on canvas 24 x 22 in 61 x 55.9 cm
So単e que revelabas (Kolyma) 2016 vinyl, dispersion and dry pigment on canvas 108 x 80 in 274.3 x 203.2 cm
Orson en Chinch贸n 2015 vinyl, dispersion, acrylic and dry pigment on canvas 22 x 16 in 55.9 x 40.6 cm
Old Baikal 2015 vinyl, dispersion, acrylic and dry pigment on canvas 24 x 18 1/4 in 61 x 46.4 cm
So単e que revelabas (Danubio) 2016 vinyl, dispersion and dry pigment on canvas 120 x 89 in 305x227 cm
LĂnea y voz 2016 vinyl, dispersion, acrylic and dry pigment on canvas 24 x 18 in 61 x 45.7 cm
So単e que revelabas (Niger) 2016 vinyl, dispersion and dry pigment on canvas 108 x 80 in 274.3 x 203.2 cm
Juan Uslé has been the subject of major retrospectives at the Es Baluard, Museu d’Art Modern i Contemporani de Palma, Palma de Mallorca (2010); the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo Málaga (2007); S.M.A.K., Ghent, Fundación Botín, Cantabria, Spain, and the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2004); the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (2003); the Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen (2002); and the Institut Valencià d’Art Modern and MACBA Museum, Barcelona (1996). He was also included in the 2005 Venice Biennale, Documenta IX (1992), the 1992 Istanbul Biennial, and the 1985 Bienal de São Paulo. In 2014, a major exhibition of Uslé’s Soñe que revelabas series was presented at the Kunstmuseum Bonn. The exhibition, titled Dark Light, traveled to the CGAC Museum, Sa ntiag o de C om postela.
Juan Uslé membrana porosa
Published on the occasion of the 2016 Cheim & Read exhibition. Design John Cheim. Essay Thomas Micchelli. Editor Ellen Robinson. Photography Ruben Gonzalez and and Jorge Cembranos. Printer GHP Media. ISBN 978–1–944316–03–7.
Cheim & Read