Lot 405 | Juan Uslé | Mecanismo Gramatical

USLÉ, JUAN
1954 Santander/ Spain

Title: Mecanismo Gramatical.
Date: 1996.
Technique: Vinyl, dispersion paint and pigments on canvas.
Measurement: 203 x 203cm.
Notation: Inscribed, signed, numbered and dated verso: NY Usle 35-96. Here also equipped with directional arrow.


Provenance:
- Galerie bob van orsouw, Zurich (label)
- Private collection North Rhine-Westphalia

Exhibitions:
- Instituto Valencia d'Arte Modern, 1997
- Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen 2002
- Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid 2004
- Fundación Marcelino Botín, Santander 2005
- S.M.A.K., Ghent 2004
- Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin 2004/05

Literature:
- Exhib. cat. Juan Uslé. Open Rooms, Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid 2004

- From the special 1990s phase of the New York paintings
- Part of the first international retrospective and other important exhibitions
- Magnificent rhythmic composition of radiant colour

The Spanish artist Juan Uslé is internationally renowned for his lively paintings that captivate the viewer with enchanting pictorial rhythms. They play with the repetition of patterns while practising a certain uniqueness. These patterns, inspired by memories lived and dreamed, recall the vibrations and movements of bustling New York City, where he lives for part of the year and where the work offered here was created.
In the early 1990s, having just arrived in New York, Uslé developed his very personal language of simultaneous styles. As in the work offered here, "Mecanismo Gramatical", from this point on his works are characterised by their uniquely intense colours and by the alternation of dynamism and immobility, gesture and geometry, and sobriety and emotionality. These characteristics appear alone or together with their opposite in all possible proportions in the composition. Conceptual-looking multiple spaces and abstract landscapes emerge, based on his lived reality of memories, emotions, coincidences and dreams. They reflect a flowing of time and show sequences of nature or city life - thus serving as a transcription of real time. Through the playful and undogmatic approach to painting, the viewer is also given a new understanding of pictorial surface or pictorial space. One encounters lyrical abstraction, amorphous structures but also figurative associations in an oscillation of pictorial depth and flatness. The artist also uses light to evoke emotions instead of an understanding of volume.
The work presented here is a prime example of this extremely exciting phase of his work and was chosen by the artist for his first important retrospective touring exhibition. Juan Uslé is one of the most important contemporary Spanish painters and was a participant in documenta IX in 1992 and in the 51st Venice Biennale in 2005.


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