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.

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

until 20th April

Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía

Calle de Santa Isabel, 52

Madrid

Sunday, 12 April 2026

Michael Raedecker: placebo drive

'I chose to combine ‘high’ painting with ‘low’ craft to create new paintings' - Michael Raedecker.

This exhibition is perhaps my favourite presentation to date of a body of work by the artist Michael Raedecker since discovering his work all those years ago at his solo show at Camden Arts Centre, and his last exhibition with GRIMM (here). It is presented in GRIMM's new gallery space at St James's and features artworks created mostly this year consisting of the artists signature combination of stitch and thread over textural print and painted surface backgrounds. Explaining the title of the exhibition the gallery press release reads - "placebo drive sits at the intersection of expectation, belief and desire. In medicine, a placebo works not because of its material properties but because of the trust in a system and the desire for an effect. In the context of painting, the placebo drive could therefore be taken as the drive to experience meaning or affect, a performed belief that something is happening. The painting functions as a placebo as it withholds certainty, offering a surface which generates a drive to look, see and understand. Placebo Drive thus names both a psychological mechanism and a spatial fiction — a road, a threshold, a passage that may exist only through the act of moving toward it. The destination remains perpetually deferred, yet the compulsion to proceed persists." The landscape dominates these artworks which are devoid of the human figure/presence, which hinted at and implied through the placement of cars and billboards. The paintings contain a narrative which heavily questions the human figures absence when objects frequently used by humans such as cars are present, but left seemingly abandoned with their doors open causing the viewer to question why? and what exactly happened or is happening?. Also implied in certain paintings is the suggestion of the supernatural, or the possibilities of presences from other dimensions or star systems through the use of the formation of lights or radiant beams of light in and descending from the heavens. In this sense Raedecker appears to be influenced by film and the history of cinema suggested by the lighting effects in his canvases such as overlook, 2026 or wild, 2025, which to my eyes recall the cinematography and lighting of films such as Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) by Steven Spielberg and the lights of otherworldly crafts. The artist seems to hinting that there is something out there that is bigger than humanity, and he is perhaps questioning this age old theory. Large advertising billboards make an appearance in these paintings too although they advertise or sell nothing specific. They hint at works of Pop Art in this respect, reminiscent of the works of Ed Ruscha. Much of this body of work also reminded me of the photography of Gregory Crewdson (here), who too has a shared cinematic vision in his aesthetic, and a definite knack for creating a mysterious narrative with or without the figure being present in his photographs. I really admire Raedecker's technique which appears to be quite involved. An original painting is photographed, and subsequently destroyed, and altered digitally before being laser printed onto individual sheets of paper. These individual prints are then applied to the surface of a canvas with a painting medium brushed onto them, causing the pigment on the printed paper to transfer onto the canvas, and the now-degraded paper scrubbed away. The surface is then subject to further alterations, more paint applied in places over the transfer, stitching that takes the form of very fine threads or thick wool. Incisions and punctures are also sometimes made into the canvas, gently frayed open, exposing further sections that are collaged from behind creating textured surfaces punctuated by thread peeping out of the splits in the surface. It is an interesting technique, of which the artist states - “I was drawn to an aesthetic whereby I was investigating painting as a historical medium in relation to a Sunday painter’s approach where there is no agenda. Just because, one loves to paint. My aim was to escape the ‘tradition of painting’, and I introduced for myself a ‘wrong’ element into the mix. I introduced a non-art technique, the thread, in combination with paint. Embroidery is a craft, it is a hobby, and like Sunday painting; embroidery does not have an ideology. I chose to combine ‘high’, painting, with ‘low’, craft, to create new paintings. So the seemingly small act of embroidery on canvas has subverted the surface and meaning of these paintings.” As an artist who uses stitch and thread in my own work I very much look forward to seeing how Raedecker develops this technique in his next show.