Juan Usle

Juan Uslé (Santander) has been living in New York since the early ’90s, and is one of the most prominent figures of contemporary painting. The hypersensitivity described by Uslé in his work is a sort of memorable visionary state because it is painful. When we see certain paintings by Uslé, always in intense, bright and burning colours, we should be reminded of encounters with one of those states that take us out of our everyday way of perceiving, Each one of these events teaches us that everything we perceive can be captured in an entirely different way, given that even a small modification of the perceptual apparatus can cause it to vary.

Some of Uslé’s paintings, the most complex, bring to mind looking through a kaleidoscope. It is useful to recall that these types of experiences, to which we are unaccustomed, are neither easy nor comfortable, and yet remain a crucial step away from being painful. In their excess they put pressure on our aesthetic expectations. This work would be the pictorial equivalent of Rimbaud’s famous quote: “dérèglement de tous les sens”.