Juan Usle's inventive abstract paintings have an edgy freshness and a strong personal element, writes Aidan Dunne.
The first paintings you encounter at Juan Usle's exhibition at the Irish Museum of Modern Art are predominantly black, and they can even seem slightly forbidding, with their rhythmic, fence-like bands. His show, Open Rooms, occupies the first floor of the east wing, and the big black paintings are hung along the corridor, making up a dark carapace that guards the interiors of the myriad individual rooms along its length.
There is a subdued, rigorous quality to these paintings - Usle compares them to prayers or incantations at one point, because of their systematic, ritualised methodology - that doesn't really prepare you for the sheer unbridled exuberance and inventiveness you find inside the rooms, where colour, line and form are allowed free rein.
With his tightly cropped hair and intense gaze, Usle, who turns 50 this year, has a boyish, slightly mischievous look about him. He and IMMA director Enrique Juncosa, who curated the show, have thought carefully about the installation. This is the fourth venue, following Spain and Belgium, and every space has been very different. Usle was particularly pleased with Belgium, because there was a passionate engagement with the work. "I mean they love it or hate it, but they get involved with it, they argue about it."
The last 17 years or so have been remarkable for him. In 1987 he and his wife, Victoria, decided to move to New York. It was a hugely challenging environment and difficult for a time but, as it happened, he loved it and loves it still. That love is clearly reciprocated, because he has thrived there and has been extraordinarily successful. New York engendered decisive changes in his painting, throwing him back on his resources and provoking a new liveliness of response. Now he is frenetically busy, his paintings are widely in demand and can be seen in many of the world's major museums.
In a way there are three interwoven strands to Usle's work. First, it displays an involved awareness with the history of painting and its current possibilities in relation to its own history - or histories. Second, it engages with the contemporary in the sense of the physical, urban environment, the media and technological landscapes, and with various bodies of theory. Third, and perhaps most importantly, Usle brings to it a quirky, incalculable element of the personal, a dimension of subjective content that informs what we see at some level, though not usually an illustrative one, for he could reasonably be described as an abstract painter.
Juncosa points out that Usle is one of many artists who, from the late 1980s, managed to reinvent abstract painting. More than anything, perhaps, he is an instinctive painter who clearly loves painting.
Juncosa quotes a statement he's fond of repeating: "The eye is the brain."
USLE WAS BORN close to Santander in northern Spain. His parents were caretakers at a convent for a closed order of nuns. "For myself and my brother it was fantastic because we had the whole countryside. We played all day." Occasionally he would accompany his mother on shopping expeditions to the city, which meant a boat trip across the bay. He remembers grave discussions about whether it was safe to set off. "For me it was a big adventure. The danger was part of it."
On one of these trips he first came across paintings, formulaic commercial landscapes, and he and his brother, to their great delight, discovered comics. There were no books at home. Earlier on, when he was perhaps five, one day he ventured into the room where, divided by a metal grille, the nuns received visitors. His head leaning against the cool metal, he saw "a painting of a woman with no hair, dressed in black, holding her heart in her hand." Already guilty at being where he was not supposed to be, he felt that her eyes followed him around the room persistently. This was a crucial experience for him.
"I still feel that you are looked at by the painting, even with abstract painting. I always have a sense of the eyes of the painting looking at you, not the other way around. When you make a painting you sometimes spend a lot of time, like a meditation, just looking at it. When I see people looking at my paintings it is as if I am the painting looking back at them, as though they are looking into my eyes."
These early experiences also account for the personal dimension in painting. "It's hard for me to see it as purely material, as a dry language. There must be something else, some mystery. I need this connection to some experience, when the painting might look very abstract. That's why I title my paintings, why I never call them Abstract 37 or whatever."
When he was about nine his parent moved into town for the sake of their sons' educational prospects. From that point on Usle's artistic aptitude became apparent to friends and teachers. They urged his parents to take him to Madrid to study art.
Though his parents were poor, they tried to provide whatever opportunities they could. By their late teens, both he and his brother were set on the path to becoming teachers. "It was a practical thing to do, for making a living." By then, though, Usle was beginning to decide things for himself. After being advised yet again to study art he enrolled in Valencia and, after a summer spent earning money working in Switzerland, began.
"It was a fantastic experience. Remember that was still in the era of Franco. The education system was very conservative. Fairness was an illusion. Everything was manipulated so that things were confined to the rich. We became politicised - we'd protest and agitate three or four days and study for one or two. Ours was the first generation in which the social classes became mixed. So that when I began to be invited to exhibit I didn't quite believe it. I thought, I'm not the kind of person who is invited."
WHILE HIS CV usually notes that he began painting in the 1980s, that is not actually true. "You want to connect with what is most contemporary. I remember saying that if Velasquez was alive then - in the 1970s - he'd be making movies. It upset some of my friends. But you want to do whatever is most modern, even if you're poorly informed, and of course at the time that wasn't painting. It could be performance or video of whatever, but not painting. But I still had a need to paint, even if it wasn't acceptable.
"So what happened was I painted when I was alone with Victoria in the evenings. It was like a kind of personal religion in the sense that it's what you believe in despite yourself, not because you want to help save humanity."
He feels he still occupies that marginal space in his work. "I still paint along the border area of things, between really good and really bad, intelligent and stupid, rational and emotional, fine and clumsy..."
Settled in New York, worried about things, not making enough money, he developed a back problem and set off trekking in Nepal to get away from things. One day he asked a Nepalese man about the traditional greeting. Was it just a meaningless pleasantry though it seemed to be more? No, he was told, the idea was to salute what is best and different in every individual. That struck a chord with him.
"Back in the studio, I had a new plan." He began work on a series of identically sized canvases. "But it was an anti-series. Each time I tried to make totally different images, as though each one was the same body with a different soul." That impulse, to second-guess himself, to try to constantly throw himself off-balance, gives his work an edgy freshness, and a playfulness, that are very appealing. Each time you approach a painting you have to try to figure out where he's coming from or, perhaps, where he's looking at you from.
He admits to liking the unexpected. "I think I need something that I don't understand in a painting. I mean of course I need life and balance and rationality, but I also need something else, something that always escapes."
Juan Usle: Open Rooms is at the Irish Museum of Modern Art until January 3rd, 2005. Tel: 01-6129900 www.modernart.ie