Garabamanthis: Juan Uslé

Coinciding with this year’s Gallery Weekend Berlin, Galerie Thomas Schulte will be hosting the presentation of new works by Juan Uslé on Friday, April 30, from 4 to 9 pm, in the exhibition “Garabamanthis,” which the artist will personally be attending.

Juan Uslé’s work is shaped by an antagonistic image-language of order and chaos, organic forms and geometric structures that are woven together in strict compositions and complex surface-entanglements. The inspiration for his work can be found in the opposing centers of the artist’s life; from the booming streets of New York to the quaint village of Saro in northern Spain, as well as in his photographic ob-servations of everything that encounters him at home and on his journeys. In contrast to a sculptor’s approach, Uslé cap-tures what he sees through a construct of surfaces, masking its three dimensionality with ornamentation.

On this note, Uslé utilizes several typical image structures that he has developed during his career and that individually reside in his work as parallel universes.

The formally reduced and at the same time most coherent group of structures is the series of black paintings, “Soñé que Revelabas,” reminiscent of modern musical notation. The most complex works in terms of composition are the heavily colored “Rizomas” which Uslé began working on in the early 1990’s.

Three of this exhibition’s large-scale paintings stem from the last group that is usually noted for its small-sized works. These works play off of a piece from 1999, transforming its theme in a variety of dispositions. Alongside this, he presents a large new work from the group “Eolo” characte-rized by the lyrical emptiness of the canvas, and an array of small-scale works, which, like a short story, are filled with great power and emphasis.