Juan Uslé (Cantabria, Spain, 1954) is one of Spain’s most internationally recognized artists, widely known for his abstract paintings. Aside from his large-scale paintings characterized by their combination of gesture and geometry, he also is a committed photographer whose lens offers an intimate and close view into the universe that surrounds him.

His images are triggered by light play, shadows, reflections and other phenomena related to light and on occasions these shots end up turning into departure points for his paintings, due to their composition or the relations that are established within them. Taken with a digital camera that he brings with him everywhere he goes, his images bring the viewer on a journey through the artist’s recent memories, emotions and dreams, underlining that the conceptual pictorial spaces of his paintings are based on reality, something that might not be evident at first glance. The artist’s personal archive, composed of thousands of photographs, offers an inside look into his particular context, helping us to understand the origin of one of the most relevant pictorial languages of the current national artistic panorama.

Uslé shoots natural and urban landscapes, still lives, familiar and anonymous characters, corners of his house, his studio and abstract surfaces, all of which come together as a chance register of his surroundings in which every element is susceptible to being photographed. Through these images physical and temporal restrictions imposed by a paused and conscious medium such as painting are erased, in order to concentrate on the complexity of his surroundings and immerse fully into the interrelations between people, objects and the medium. Aside from this, his work suggests an evident relation between the photographic language and the pictorial. The precise combination of light and darkness, the use of a wide and lively colour palette and the superimposition of planes and geometries that characterize Uslé’s pictorial work –in which abstract expressionist influences and conceptual movements of the 1970s coalesce–, are present in his photography. The motives, textures and tonalities captured with his camera initiate a dialogue with the approach to the artist’s canvases. Photography not only has allowed him to introduce the effects of action into his work such as improvisation and the unexpected, but also has allowed him to deepen his own perception of time in order to layout the workings of his painter’s mind.

To this day his most extensive photographic installation has been Línea Dolca. 2008-2018. Irrefrenable, recently exhibited in Valencia, Santander, Berlin and Madrid. The work is composed of 7 paintings and 182 photographs in small format, selected among all of the images captured by Uslé between the years of 2008 and 2018 in different parts of the world –from New York, where the artist moved to in the mid 1980s, to Saro, village in the north of Spain in which he spends long periods of time– and which constitute an invitation to discover the photographic eye of the renowned painter. The composition along a long horizontal line formed by the intersection of a white wall with a chocolate coloured inverted pedestal, alluding to the former chocolate bar brand Dolca, allows for the recognition of these relations between forms and colours fundamental to the understanding of his work. Línea Dolca is also an investigation of duality, a concept that is constant in the artist’s practice, duality between the urban and the natural, the fast and the slow, and in this case, the pictorial and photographic.

Juan Uslé was the winner of the National Art Prize awarded by the Spanish cultural ministry in 2002. His work is part of some of the most important public and private collections of the worlds such as the one of the Centre Pompidou (Paris), the Guggenheim (Bilbao), the MNCARS (Madrid), the Museu Serralves (Oporto), the Tate Modern (London), the Moderna Museet (Stockholm), the Belgacom Collection (Brussels), the Colección Arte Contemporáneo Fundación La Caixa (Barcelona), the Museo Patio Herreriano (Valladolid), the AENA Foundation (Madrid), the Banco de España Foundation (Madrid), and the Marugame Hirai Museum (Japan), among many others. He has participated in the 51st Venice Biennial in 2005, Documenta 9 in Kassel in 1992, curated by Jan Hoet, and the XXIII Sao Paulo Biennial in 1985, and has had a great number of exhibition among which stand out the ones at MACBA, the IVAM, Saatchi Gallery, the Museo Serralves, the Ludwig Museum Vienna, the New Museum in New York or the Palacio de Velázquez, for an anthology of his work entitled: Open Rooms.