Since moving to New York in 1988, Juan Uslé’s (b.1954, Santander, Spain) painting has become noticeably orientated towards abstraction. Inspired as much by everyday life as by the work of other abstract painters, he creates extremely varied works that renew the pictorial and spiritual vitality of abstraction. Uslé always seeks to arouse the viewer’s curiosity in relation to the plane and the picture space in a playful and undogmatic way.

Jugadores del País del Queso (‘Players in the land of cheese’, 1996) is painted on a luminous white canvas which underlines the immediacy of the pictorial gesture. Playing skillfully with the genres of abstract painting, Uslé alternates them rhythmically: the blue ‘background’ is made up of regular horizontal lines which hark back to a self-referential type of painting contrasting with to the lyrical abstraction of the amorphous structures of the red field in the painting. The oscillation between depth and flatness and between figurative allusions and abstract forms creates a pictorial language in which the ‘mute dialogue between sensation and reason’ (Juan Uslé), that belongs to painting, is able to come into play.