joseph scissorhands: Juan Uslé: Ese barco en la montaña (That Ship on the Mountain)

Saturday, 18 April 2026

Juan Uslé: Ese barco en la montaña (That Ship on the Mountain)

"I think that I begin these paintings looking for silence. And the mechanism, this form of making them, speaks to me from pure necessity. I feel a necessity to make these paintings, as if it were a ritual, the reciting of a prayer: fusing calm and action, trying not to think, listening to my body. Making them is like filling the world with silence, from the void, in order also to signify at least one sufficiently large, generous space, chosen for that purpose. It’s like a cleansing exercise, to seek emptiness, guided by a biological reference point. Perhaps I make them because we see too impurely, and we are sometimes tormented by images. We are so overloaded with images that we breathe, we live more and more." - Juan Uslé.

Juan Uslé, a new artist to me, whom I discovered at his one man retrospective on a visit to the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía during my recent Madrid visit. I was struck by the Spanish artists skilled repetitive mark making to give a strong sense of pattern in his large canvases. Some are like highly complex woven textiles, whilst others evoke indigenous printed textiles. They are lovely grids of textural lines punctuated by dots or other geometric devices. Others are very painterly in the Western abstract art tradition, exercises in shape, form and loose brushwork. It is very evident that Uslé revels in the viscerality of the medium of paint as well as the physicality of the act of painting itself. Though now based in New York, Uslé is apparently one of Spain's most revered painters, and this exhibition entitled Ese barco en la montaña (That Ship on the Mountain) includes around 100 works spanning four decades of the artist’s career. The paintings themselves have a dark undercurrent with Uslé taking as the starting point of the paintings the memories of the tragedy of the shipwreck of the Elorrio off the Cantabrian coast in December 1960, which the artist actually witnessed as a boy. This tragedy is reflected in the paintings of ships and also the use of the colour black which is ever present in his palette but enlivened by the presence of flashes of brighter colours which run across the canvas surfaces. The theme of water or the marine seems to be a constant in the paintings, the ripples evoked in fan-like flourishes of the brush of certain pieces seems to make the paintings' surfaces ripple with movement. Part of Uslé's practice also involves the use of photography. As a student in Valencia, he painted his room black to enable him to use it as a photographic darkroom. This exhibition includes a couple of rooms devoted to this aspect of his practice displayed with some smaller canvases unusually at a mid-height dividing line around the space. They are snapshots of New York life and as well as the marine theme often form the inspiration for his paintings. We know next to nothing of Uslé's significant body of work in the UK, and I was more than happy to make his acquaintance through this enlightening retrospective exhibition.