NYAB Event - Juan Uslé “Membrana Porosa”

Juan Uslé “Membrana Porosa”

Cheim & Read

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Cheim & Read presents Membrana Porosa—an exhibition of recent paintings by Spanish artist Juan Uslé. Uslé has been showing with Cheim & Read since 1997; his last exhibition with the gallery was in 2011.

Continuity and discontinuity, light and shadow, material and illusion are the drivers of Juan 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 comprising these bands are based on the artist’s pulse—in an interview with John Yau for The Brooklyn Rail, he describes his “sequential field or territory of marks” as a “cardiogram.” If so, it is a cardiogram that is ruptured, torn, and tattered.

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 small-scale In Kayak paintings. Often these interventions are painted with a jagged edge, a hint of violence that resembles a piece of snapped, serrated celluloid. As light travels through the filmic skin of the paint—the “porous membrane”—it bounces off the lustrous surface of the gesso, illuminating the image from behind.

Uslé has been the subject of major retrospectives at the Es Baluard, Museu d’Art Modern I Contemporani de Palma, Palma de Mallorca, Palma de Mallorca, Spain in 2010, the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo Málaga in 2007, SMAK, Ghent, and the Irish Museum of Modern Art in 2004, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in 2003, and the Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno in 1996. He was also included in the 2005 Venice Biennale, Documenta IX, the 1992 Istanbul Biennial and the1985 Bienal de Sao Paulo.