C110 review

Dublin: Juan Uslé at Irish Museum of Modern Art

Juan UslŽ: Fisuras con vŽrtigo, 2001-02, vinyl, dispersion and dry pigments on canvas, 203 x 274 cm, Collection CAM de Arte Contemporáneo, Alicante; courtesy Irish Museum of Modern Art

Juan UslŽ's paintings can be both playful and precise, methodical and organically rich. His small works are austere and graceful, working within an elemental language of bands and pours. Larger pieces are chaotic compositions filled with squabbling arabesques, skalextric loops and telephone-cord wriggles of paint.

Visitors to UslŽ's show at IMMA are led slowly into the dynamic tangle of this language with the aptly entitled Encuentros (1997) ('encounters' or 'meetings'.) This is a gorgeously simple piece composed only of quivering horizontal bands, in gradations of thin, sharkskin-grey and inky, night-sky blue. The gentle movements of the bands are like movements of thoughts and evoke memories of watching rain lashing against the sea at night. It is easy then to imagine this painting as being a remembrance of such an encounter.

Juan UslŽ: Voice, 1997, vinyl, dispersion and dry pigment on canvas, 56 x 41 cm, Collection UslŽ-Civera, Saro; courtesy Galerie Tim Van Laere, Antwerp; courtesy Irish Museum of Modern Art

From Encuentros one moves into the first large room of paintings. Guess and end (2002) is another small piece composed of intervallic bands, but the movement of this piece is multi-directional. Planes of deep, incandescent orange are broken up by traces of wet-on-wet greys, thin strips of mid-blue and vertical drags of black over gold. Guess and end also suggests a language of memory, but within a given passage of time, like the movement from morning through to night.

The second room introduces some much larger paintings. Fragmentos ibŽricos (1992-1993) features shimmering bands of colour, almost like strips of sheet metal. These bands map out the space within the painting in quite an improvisational manner. This leaves the piece, and similar ones, feeling unresolved. On repeated viewing, however, the chatter of these paintings becomes almost like being amongst multiple conversations on the metro or when out with friends. I imagine this sense of noise and surface listening is part of where these particular pieces come from.

UslŽ's language of motifs broadens considerably in subsequent rooms. Pieces such as Manthis (1998-1999) or Fragmentos de Felipe IV (2001) are lively combinations of spaghetti-junction squiggles, labyrinthine, layered grids and idiosyncratic pockets of rainbow-like colour arrangements.

Juan UslŽ, Historia con tres nudos, 1997, vinyl, dispersion and dry pigment on canvas, 274 x 203 cm; Collection Galería Soledad Lorenzo, Madrid; courtesy Irish Museum of Modern Art

Mecanismo gramatical (1995-1996) forms an amalgam of his busy and quiet paintings. This work is dominated by a large cumulus-cloud shape, within which UslŽ has made confident, spiralling gestures in black. At the bottom of the painting are seven small squares, similar to Encuentros, only painted in browns and gold. They form moments of stillness amongst bustle, like being on your own in a busy restaurant or waiting for a plane.

The real let-down of the show, however, was the arrangement of the SoñŽ que revelabas pieces. These are tall, very dark paintings, made up of endlessly repetitive, horizontal and vertical, staggered drags. Arranged, equally spaced, in a long narrow corridor, they punctuated the space with heavy thuds and it was impossible to step back from them so that they could fully play on your optics.

Cian Donnelly is and artist and writer based in Belfast.

Juan UslŽ: Open Rooms, Irish Museum of Modern Art, September 2004 - January 2005

Article reproduced from CIRCA 110, Winter 2004, pp.80–81
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