Rocío de la Villa ///

Juan Uslé. Between the Lucid and Obscure Chambers

International consensus about the fact that "one has to go back to seeing painting" has situated Juan Uslé (Santander, 1954) at the centre of the consolidation of a reflective gaze in relation to the pictorial image in Spain. A gaze that has been weakly maintained until now in our artistic tradition, considered to be prone to value expressive spontaneity –from rupture to parody– and the material sensuality of the gesture on the canvas. But in line with the challenge that other more well-known post-modern painters, with whom Uslé stands elbow-to-elbow on the international level, have supported in the light of the emerging of new mediums for visual representation: given that critical marginality and the effective survial of the pictorial over the last decades have been judged to be dependent on their relationship with other ways of seeing and of interpreting the artistic deed. Uslé's current position as a defensor of that other pictorial tradition also has a lot to do with with how one perceives in his work the tension that it holds with the autonomy/heteronomy dialectic of the pictorial in the setting of the visual arts. Two of his recent interventions in Spain were very clear as to this inflection.