Ismael Teira – Vicky Uslé
The concept of the garden somehow permeates the paintings in Light and Passage. Artificial, domesticated, limited, and – in a way – safe and secure, the garden stands out as a pleasant place, a locus amoenus that is tinged – in accordance with the Judeo-Christian tradition – with Edenic references.
The nature of a garden is preserved from what stands outside – as in the medieval hortus conclusus – and serves as refuge from the locus horridus, that is, from places that are dangerous and hostile to the human species, as the pandemic metropolis is today and the dark, vermin-plagued jungles were in other times.
Vicky Uslé, however, proposes a pleasant yet passionate stroll through each of the “surprising details” of our biotope.
The exhibition’s title itself, Light and Passage, may conjure up two important questions regarding the morphology of the garden. On the one hand, the fact that it is a place of light, since darkness would associate it with the locus horridus. On the other, the possibility if offers for taking a stroll, for walking in safety. Does the title include any other references or motivations?
Yes, light is the beginning, and it’s almost everything. It helps us to see forms, rhythms and colours, and trust they are there, in front of us, favouring the ideas they gift us. They somehow remain inside us, they feed us and help us grow, and create an inner and outer “space of our own”: that is how plants grow. But, knowing as we do that our growth gives rise to new ideas, new forms and words, sometimes sharply defined but generally tangled up in a kind of wild forest-garden, we must approach it quietly, in order to clear it without doing harm.
My work is sometimes associated with the idea of landscape, perhaps because of its elements of colour, structure, rhythm and primordially organic gestures; but in my understanding, landscape as a genre must frame nature such as it is perceived, depicted and imagined. I see my work as resulting from the action and interaction of natural factors and human factors, with all that such a relationship carries with it: bonds, humanity, interaction, life experiences..., childhood.
My “passage” emerges from that twofold process of slowly disentangling and sorting things, so that something can then be made out of that tangle, and put forth as a proposal. So it’s a process in a state of growth, a process that takes place within that permanent interaction between society and nature; it’s a land of passage, a humanly felt passage, and a leftover deriving from the procedural representation of the process itself.
I clear my passage in a forest, in a city, in the studio. I soak up the exuberant gardens that appear before me, and bring them towards the inside of myself. The paths I open up as I move forward, going deeper, are usually the ones I’m most interested in. Their interest lies precisely in the fact that I’m on a voyage of discovery, moving ever further forward, without quite knowing where I’m being led. I might find a trail, a sign, or a warren.
If I didn’t dare to stray from the safety of the beaten track, I’d get complacent, and complacency would interfere with my process of discovery. The path is also wild, and can be hostile, because of the inducements, the eagerness, and the risk it entails.
Light also leads us to thought and contemplation, to the observation of the “places and ideas” that take shape in the half-light, in the light that may be vibrant or tenuous, and cause sparks to fly. The more of these there are, the greater is the doubt, the more the useful questions that arise, to strengthen us in our odyssey towards a place of reunion, in the course of an intense conversation with painting. It’s landscape as a process of becoming and as a place of passage, in which the by-product is always painting.
According to philosopher Alain Roger, two types of artialisation occur in the contemplation of nature: the first is direct, and happens in situ; the second is indirect, and happens in visu. What contexts or circumstances have served you as an inducement as regards the former?
For a start, I think that being in touch with nature from a very early age has strongly influenced me. I lived in an old mill on the Miera River, and had the run of the surrounding country, where I would dash about, and splash in the water, and discover untold “surprising details” of nature: the insects, the little animals, the leaves and the rocks... At dusk it was almost a daily routine for us to take a swim in the river, and I always found it moving to watch the dying light of the sun as it tinged the rocks with warm hues, and slid silently over the enormous boulders that merged with the sky on either side of the river.
The need to move, wherever one may be, is imperative. It is essential to set in motion what we see, and what we develop in the course of that vital passage through memory and the practice of painting. Everything is bound up with everything else, and produces that resulting, leftover body of stuff. The magic of movement appears in the water of a river, as things are shaded and then unveiled; the mud is hidden and revealed, and there are the singular shapes of the leaves, the pebbles, the branches dragged along by the current, and now and then a daring trout, who might not just be daring but also know that our shadow could never catch it.
Afterwards, in the studio, other things happen. The soul grows calm again, and waits for a sparkle. I always remember when we came out of the water, I was wrapped in an enormous towel, and would always beg for a last look at the fading reflections that the sun gave us when it said goodbye, before taking itself off to bed and saying, “See you tomorrow!”
Now, when I enter the studio, I often remember two of the feelings I had then: on the one hand, a certain sadness, and on the other, a certain joy. I would return home, wrapped in my towel, and I was full of questions, and not feeling much like supper. Art, I now think, also feeds us; but at the time I only felt emotions, and stored them away inside me.
In Berlin, while I was looking at some of the paintings of G. D. Friedrich, I felt what some historians have tried to define as “the sublime”. There was something like that in those pictures: the light moved slowly towards the horizon, and a part of ourselves seemed to move with it. The works were strange, not just full of beauty – and it was something beyond beauty that moved me; it was that overwhelming, and maybe also inevitable, sense of things sliding away. A kind of dispossessed beauty that transcends objects, goes beyond what is material, and becomes pure moving emotion: a passage that moves towards the immense.
Those concepts of in situ and in visu I take into the studio with me, into my workshop, because that’s where I let things settle, and look for answers. It doesn’t matter where you are, the sparkle emerges, and sparks emerge too, and that’s what matters to me. What my eyes single out, where they take me, where they come to rest – I try to respect that. My surroundings enrich my senses and my memory, and it’s like a primordial cocktail which I’m open to, which I try to nurture before releasing it through my hands.
To me, the process of interiorising things is like pouring them slowly through a strainer, and that helps us to purify other processes that have “scratched” (or dented) our “anima”. What we do in the studio is blend silence and time, making our imaginarium grow. It’s a vital and a mental process, a gradual process of becoming ourselves and being moulded through change, through transition, as part of unrecoverable transit, as experience.
Today, when distances no longer exist and what is remote is no longer so far away, it becomes increasingly necessary to learn the value of every path, every passage, every road. But the experience of the studio is also substantial, and generates matter, like a brick that is, at the same time, a document. The question is how to record and make true what we give shape to, and call – sometimes unwittingly – our art.
To finish, a poem by Emily Dickinson comes to mind:
Silence is all we dread.
There’s Ransom in a Voice –
But Silence is Infinity.
Himself have not a face.
Published in Makma, March 9, 2021
Eduardo García Nieto.
"When Xenophon brougt the word paradise from the East, Praxitele put an emerald in Athena’s breastplate. Green brought wisdom”
Derek JARMAN, Croma, 1994
“An ego that, consequently, can’t know but be, in this ego for this very reason there can’t be anything but pure remission to the Other.”
Rosalind E. KRAUSS, The Optic Unconcious, 1993
Let’s enter; being strangers in our own familiar surroundings, a step further, a moment more and the questions begin. A voyage into the distance is not worth it if we let ourselves be limited by what we have learnt; knowledge, knowing, is built on fears and prejudices. To oppose these, to be brave means knowing how to be vulnerable and to question ourselves, even if this produces the vertigo of feeling alive.
What surrounds us has never been a safe environment; we prefer to forget this and this forgetting comes back to us as a punch in our consciousness. We have always lived in paradise, but this habitat has never been as we have been told it was. It doesn’t stop being significant that the term has been brought into western culture by Xenophon after a military excursion in Persia. Its etymology, Pari Paera, around the wall, reminds us that what defines paradise was the presence of a limit, an obstacle to its contemplation and enjoyment.
The other side of its genesis was the word of the others, the foreigners, those who because of their non-belonging meant they were a danger. Not in vane did Alberto Cardin in Dialectics and Cannibalism (1994) point out that the meaning of cannibal was simply neighbour. Paradise was then a garden inhabited by others beginning with a limit. The Hortus locus or even Josa went on stressing this notion of property and exclusion. The fiction of a limit, the fiction of the other.
From the IV century BC the limit defines the garden, a century before that Anaxagoras and Democritus laid down geometric and perspective theories, which will make painting the one we know, defined by the frame. Through the renaissance this system of representation was defined as “legitimate construction”, the law that started again with the obstacle in vision and what had been proven. The fiction of the window mustn’t let us forget that this must be supported by a wall.
How do you paint a garden knowing that both systems are fed by exclusion?
It is significant that the history of gardening looks to classical Greece as an sphere without garden, when it is there where the term paradise first appears in Europe and where its mythology includes the garden of the Hesperides, Hera’s garden where the tree of golden apples grew, the apples which conceded immortality. The garden was named after the nymphs who lived there and made sure that no one could get to the fruit. Ladon, a hundred-headed dragon helped in the task.
The role of women in the garden has never been very nice, even when these have transformed it into a place of knowledge, conceiving the garden as a library: Digitalis Purpurea, Mandragora Autumnalis, Datura... but these efforts to stop paradise becoming a trap for women turned it into a sentence.
How can a woman paint in the garden?
Vicky Uslé (Santander, 1981) dares to look into the garden and claim it for herself. Innocence may be one of the motors of artistic production but it is far from being ingenious. The author not only recognized the depth of the history of art, but also knows that her analysis of the garden in painting questions the very notions that we have about it and the space as an environment, the fragmentation and the breaking up of surfaces, even in the choice of materials, a fiction of inheritors, not forgetting that representation (“capacity of vividly presenting a theme”) is the article of reality of art or, in the words of Cocteau, it is “a lie which always tells the truth”.
“The garden is barren, the grass is tall and reaches up the walls, (...) we only feel the look. We don’t know what to look is.”
Marguerite DURAS, The love, 1971
“The harshness of the world was tranquil. The murder was deep. And death was not the one we thought. (...) Because life was dangerous. She loved the world, loved it while creating, loved it with repugnance.”
Clarice LISPECTOR, Love, 1952
Another possible way into the garden; Clarice Lispector and Marguerite Duras have published two stories with almost the same title, Love and The love, in which the garden can be considered as just another character. Despite the titles, the narrations can’t be further from the idea of romantic love as conceived in the last century.
Ana, a housewife immersed in the daily routine, which Lispector give nearly vegetable qualities – “I had the need to feel the solid roots of the things” – is surprised by the look of a blind person being led through the botanic garden so bursting with life that it frightens her. Duras’s characters live in a garden as rocky and arid as their relationships without communication or contact. This absence of contact is something common in these tales, no one breaks through the bodily limits, no one touches the other, no one goes over the limits of their own body, redefining our perception of the other.
Nature not only is a metaphor of the setting or habitat, it is an emotional experience of the environment and the only thing that goes over these limits, that is broken through, invaded, in comparison to the protagonists, watching.
When Rosalind E. Krauss analyses the perceptive apparatus of Étant Donnés by Duchamp (1945-1966) part of the optic analysis that Lyotard presents us with in this piece: not only does it insist on the mechanisms of perceptive, but also on the incorporation of the body of the spectator/voyeur into the mechanism of vision, making up the piece itself. Duchamp already had pleaded for the need of the spectator to complete the meaning of the artistic piece, but in this case the need is not only intellectual or visual, it’s physical: a body in the mirror with the body that lies, between nature, the other side of the door constructed as limit. Duchamp, in his criticism of the retinal, has been one of the arguments used to insult painting, ignoring the interest in Optics as a science and his knowledge that vision is constructed in our mind.
The pieces by Vicky Uslé invite us to ask ourselves which part of the garden we are looking at, we focus on a detail or a plant, or even an emotion that this garden transmits to us. The contemplation isn’t ingenious, our brain constructs it with its visual charge, but also with the weight of culture of our social learning and the information that the rest of our body lends to the experience. Our neutral knowledge interweaved in the architecture of the place itself where the pieces a displayed.
Donna Haraway or Juhani Pallasma vindicate this type of knowledge, that we should not consider as a directly opposed to vision, but as, in the words of Diego del Pozo, a “’soft space’ as space motivated by the constant reference to our direct environment”. This type of analysis connected to the pictorial experience of Leonora Tanning appears described by Alison Rowley in 1993 but maybe we should normalise them and apply them when enjoying the artistic production of other artists, more precisely the project that Uslé is presenting in our gallery.
“Shine the color
Cast him in violet
Curtain close my eyes
Take his light from mine”
Perfume Genius, Moonbend, 2020
Reading today about non-touching love in an inhospitable natural environment with human beings may have other implications, but we shouldn’t forget that when faced the zeitgeist there exists an eternal return, and that this fiction of limits at its base feeds on and is built from the function of the other.
Vicky Uslé’s work is constructed around an us in this ambiguous garden, in which geometry itself, evoking the limit is diluted and contaminated. We are living on a planet where animal life only makes up 0.3% compared to the vegetable, thus speaking of the garden of its history and implications, of it’s relation to women and the hegemonic domination of man over nature, means rethinking who lives where. The only thing that is left to us is to allow our bodies to keep on learning and that our consciousness allows us to identify the moments in which tiny fragments of life exist.
2020
Brett Littman
In my first studio visit with the artist Vicky Uslé in New York in the summer of 2018, I brought up the idea that her abstract works on paper reminded me of windows or doors and that led to a discussion of the concept of the “borrowed landscape,” an essential feature of Japanese garden design. Uslé, has been thinking about Japan and Japanese aesthetics for a long time – but she had never visited the country. We looked at a book of Tsukioka Yoshithoshi´s woodblock prints that she had and talked about my impressions of Japan, a place I have gone to quite a few times, even before I became Director of the Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum. After our conversations I encouraged her to plan a trip to Japan – I truly thought that it would be a place that would have an impact on her work and her thinking about how to contextualize and expand her painting practice into three dimensions and architectural space.
In the winter of 2018, Uslé decided to go to Japan to experience first-hand Japanese culture, architecture and the profound and wonderful gardens of Tokyo and Kyoto. She visited the Nezu Museum, designed by Kenzo Kuma, and it’s amazing and garden in the middle of Tokyo, where one miraculously feels totally transported out of time and the city. At the Meiji Jingsu’s inner gardens, Uslé took in the scents of the blooming flowers and the camphor trees. In Kyoto, at the Heian Jingsu and the Shin En, the experience of walking on and erasing with her footprints the meditative daily morning work of the monks who rake the gravel and earth brought a heightened sense of self-presence and a poetic understanding of the cycles of creation and destruction. During an early morning visit to Ryoan-ji, Uslé focused on the clay walls, which she described to me as velvet-like, the changing colors of the various areas as the sun passed over, the rock gardens and the aromas of the gardens themselves. Walking the Philosopher’s Path, she was taken with Honen-In, a smaller temple that is full of subtle and unexpected details.
Since Uslé’s trip to Japan she has continued to ruminate about how she might incorporate some of the elements that make up Japanese garden design (the major elements are: stone gathering, stone structures and groupings, stepping stones, gravel patterns, stone lanterns, plants, water elements, fences, hedges and walls, and the idea of incorporating “borrowed landscapes” to frame the other elements) into a new installation for Galeria Carles Taché for the Gallery Weekend in Barcelona. Uslé, who wants to transmit the exchange of cultural ideas, the fluidity between history and the present, and a deep sense of sensory experience, has decided to create an interior garden path in the gallery to complement her large scale works on paper. Inspired by her own experience walking on raked gravel and earth in Japan, Uslé will create the path out of gravel, earth and stones. This path will lead to three new paintings on paper on the far wall of the gallery that she has made since returning from Japan. This spare, experiential installation will allow the viewer to focus his or her energies on the “walk” to these works which have been stimulated by her memories, imagination and real experiences from her visits to the gardens in Tokyo and Kyoto.
2019
Bea Espejo
The painting of Vicky Uslé grows out of a stable imbalance.
Her painting grows out of a stable imbalance, from which possibilities rise up to meet the unexpected. That sounds a bit like shooting into the air, but all we need to do is imagine a random moment, while steering our gaze towards several horizons at the same time. The horizons of Vicky Uslé (Santander, 1981) are usually two: Saro, in Cantabria (Spain) and New York. In both of these she has been living and working since just over a decade ago, when she joined that new generation of artists who stretch, twist and bend, and expand the idea of painting. Her painting is created within a time that is suspended in the solitude of the studio. The quiet oscillating movement of ideas is surely its most deeply rooted feature. These ideas are the vehicle for her exhibition at the Travesía Cuatro gallery, in Madrid. The show functions like a musical composition, combining large works painted in pastel, on paper, that hang on walls which are also painted like a large, expanded canvas. The sound they emit is almost nonexistent, like the sound of the wind locked inside the video that brings the exhibition to a close: a static shot of a tree-top dancing tirelessly against the sky. There is something about these pictures that crackles like a bonfire, and moves in oscillation. Something like whispers and silence at the same time. In fact, movement is one of the keys of Vicky Uslé’s painting. Form and emptiness coexist, set the limits, and invite slow and careful contemplation, as if stubbornly delighting in the minutest details. That’s what we do: peel our eyes and finely thread our observation. We notice the title: Autumn Blaze. In America, that applies to a species of tree – the Freemanii – that can be found in huge forests, whose gradual change in colour generates endless visual play in the autumn. It’s an implicit reference, but it has the effect of a boomerang. The same applies to the two other exhibitions of the artist in Barcelona and Valencia, a few months ago: Un ligero cielo amarillo, at Carles Taché, and Password, at Espai Tactel. All three shows look into the possibilities of abstraction, the interconnections between abstraction and painting, and the poetical mediation of colour. They complement each other, but there is a difference in nuance. In this case, the works operate as drawings, and carry with them the intrinsic qualities of the medium, that is to say, spontaneity, fluidity, and lightness. They also demand slowness and concentration. For Vicky Uslé, work on paper has always been a laboratory in which to create a visual database. That is what this show is; the freest exhibition the artist has offered us to date. Don’t be in a hurry. It may all seem simple, but everything here takes place at another pace, like the growth of plants.
Published in El País – January 7, 2019
Luis Francisco Pérez
There are exhibition titles which – in a subtly indirect and poetic way – place the viewer in the right position, at the proper distance to make the display an optical experience that goes beyond the mere visual perception of the presented works. This may be said about the current show by Vicky Uslé (Santander, 1981) at the Travesía Cuatro gallery. The title of the exhibition – Autumn Blaze – is at the same time a name and a sign, or a clue, regarding the distinctive nature of the exhibited work, which is experienced as soon as the visitor walks into the gallery; it also becomes apparent in the photographic exhibits that are included in the show. We are talking about the paintings, of course, but referring as well to the sophisticated setting: an installation in which the colour of the walls (an intelligent and sensual mise-en-scène) comes to the fore (thereby creating a “spatial temperature” that is as effective as it is unique) in such a way that the large works on paper become the centre pieces of what might indeed be called an “installation”, or more exactly an “intervention” in the exhibition space. In the fine and enlightening notes by Enrique Juncosa that go with the show, we are told – and this is important in terms of absorbing the exhibits with a greater wealth of detail – that “immense forests of trees belonging to the species Freemanii ‘Autumn Blaze’ are to be found in Canada; their gradual change of colour, in the autumn, generates impressive visual spectacles”. Thus the visitor, upon entering the gallery, is met by an impressive “autumn blaze”. Vicky Uslé lives between the Cantabrian village of Saro, in Spain, and New York; we may therefore be sure that the “autumn blaze” spectacle, which nature offers in Canada, she has also witnessed in the woods and forests of New England, which are reasonably close to New York. One might wonder, on the basis of such geographical and secularly pantheistic information, whether these generous works on paper – painted with crayons (rather than done “in pastel”) and hung unframed, like “leaves in the wind”, to use a slightly kitsch metaphor – do not in fact place before us, or surround us with, a refined and very free exercise of artistic landscape painting in the pure present; we could even refer to these works as elements that articulate a new sense of “landscape painting” in current art practice. Although the following reference does not bear any similarity to these paintings by Vicky Uslé, the truth is that while carefully examining the latter I was reminded of the recent, extraordinary work of David Hockney. I’m referring to the landscapes, the woods and the wet, shadowy lanes of Hockney’s home territory of Yorkshire, which he painted after leaving sunny California behind and returning to England. I’ve just said that the example is not valid in terms of finding a potential stylistic parallel between Uslé and the most recent work of Hockney, and would stand by my statement (the ever-present figurative bent in the English artist would make such a parallel especially impossible) but there is a point of connection between the two. Both aspire to show the expressive complexity of nature (whether or not it is apparent in the art itself) by means of its internal sequences and harmonies, its cyclical and expansive waves, its sounds and its music. It is precisely to talk about the “music” of these works on paper that we must return to the forests of New England, and specifically to the town of Concord, in the state of Massachusetts. In the course of the first two decades of the 20th century, North American composer Charles Ives wrote one of his most beautiful works, the Piano Sonata number 2, also known as the “Concord Sonata”. During the 45 to 50 minutes of the lovely composition, Ives offers the listener a musical interpretation of the natural surroundings of the little East Coast village. The sonata is structured in four sections that render tribute to four characters (very well-known figures, especially in the United States) who were either born in Concord or died there, or lived there. The titles of the sections, in the order in which they can be heard, are “Emerson” (Ralph Waldo Emerson), “Hawthorne” (Nathaniel Hawthorne), “The Alcotts” (Bronson Alcott and Louisa May Alcott, the author of Little Women) and “Thoreau” (Henry David Thoreau). It was Charles Ives himself who referred to this beautiful sonata as a piece of “transcendentalism of nature”, which doesn’t necessarily mean it should only be interpreted as a reading of nature from the point of view of the infinity of the sublime. The outskirts of Concord, however, do offer their well-known, yearly “autumn blazes”, which Vicky Uslé has so admirably interpreted (in their musical sense, of course) on the basis of a reading of the “transcendent” which illustrates, in a beautiful and intelligent way, the abstract quality of nature. We may say that “abstraction” is a way of reflecting the brutal indifference of nature to humanity, which observes, enjoys and suffers its spectacles. The accurately apt colours of the gallery walls (reds, blacks, blues, greens, that are in tune with some of the colours of the works exhibited on them) together with the manner in which the works on paper are hung, like “windows” or “perspectives” in their classic sense, create a subtle interplay that is both visual and conceptual, merging backdrops and figures, as if the true abstraction were to be found in the subdued dramatic colourfulness of the walls themselves – that is, the “backdrop” – and the works on paper were the equally authentic “figures” that correspond to human nature. This is why Vicky Uslé’s magnificent show is much more than a mere exhibition of very well painted works on paper. It is, rather, a sophisticated exercise of poetic abstraction, which may well be one of the names that the unquestionable “reality” of nature possesses. Blazes do not exist for nature, but only for those who contemplate or suffer them. That is perhaps the most beautiful idea one can come away with after visiting this exhibition.
Published in Crítica en el muro, Ediciones PROAP, 2019
Mariano Navarro
Although not so many years have gone by, a little over four, since her Madrid launch in this very gallery, Vicky Uslé (Santander, Spain 1981) has gone a long way in defining and specifying her pictorial language, which already has its own, peculiar place among her peers.
I would not say she avoids the common trends among young painters, rather, she has not been interested in them. Instead, she has embarked on a quest, in search of a space or path of her own, continuing and reinforcing open propositions within abstraction, capable of offering what is most difficult in art; an image on which to think, while being overwhelmed
by emotion.
In her visual universe orbit Japanese engravers Tsukioka Yoshitoshi or Hokushai, as well as film makers Ozu and Mizoguchi, Agnes Martin’s austere rigour, the subtle transparency of Eva Hesse’s drawings, and the delicacy of those by Joseph Beuys, even Olafur Eliasson with his work diagrams. Most of them artists tangled up between their experience and that of nature. Also present are many contemporary architects and architectures, Peter Zumptor and Herzog & De Meuron, as well as the Viennese expressionists and utopians such as Bruno Taut, who discovered in the West the Katsura Imperial Villa. The Katsura Imperial Villa is most probably the idea with which Vicky Uslé feels most identified. The marvellous conjunction of interiors and gardens of that 17 th century construction produce, in the words of an architect, a continuous “inside-outside”. According to Taut, it constitutes the “quintessence of Japanese aesthetics”. The artist displays her bond with it, when in private correspondence she writes to me, “I am interested in what relates to the idea interior- exterior, the other skin, the skin that protects and articulates, that moves”.
Her vision responds to a honed sensitivity for the minute. The minimal could be imperceptible, enveloped, suffocated by general shape, yet she is fully aware of the minimal as that place where surprise occurs and generates sense. At the same time, since it resolves itself intimately, what is fitting is the small and singular, and the rest is just surroundings and atmosphere.
Untitled, 2010, is a magnificent link between the work in her previous show and an important part of those in the present one. A structural drawing, contained, and lineally delimitated, of a delicate, harmonious chromia, blues and rose pinks, that composes a figure which is both defined and of an evanescent mobility, occupies an important part of the previously white surface, and infuses motion in it. All that formal structure agitates and moves, as driven by the old whip game, by a tail with two elements, one semi-circular, the other triangular and split in two, of livelier colours, yellows and fired up reds, which acquire the weight of the airy mass and transmit their joyous energy.
The two larger drawings in this show have more of a final lightness. These, also Untitled, dated this very year. They arise from a germinal brushstroke, cumulate gestures for the
concretion of each fragment, while the figure that they generate ascends or descends vertically and it could be said to be as subtle as the substance that composes them.
These are, obviously, elements within a series, better yet, the resulting products of one same moment of lucid work. They are composed of the same intense, tense fragility as Emily
Dickinson’s poetry. They enjoy lightness while diving into the depths.
Certainly their lack of gravity becomes fleshy thanks to colour, which in Vicky Uslé is product and not reproduction. I dare to say that, touched by magic, she finds in colour those
virtues and qualities that make her work more personal and true.
Of importance, too, is the way she applies it. Her technical skill and proficient training are obvious, as much as the intuition that guides her, for instance, to fuse a colour with another
in a space so reduced that the eye inevitably stops there, as impressed as it is moved by the beauty that emerges from such a happy encounter. Also, her ability to conjugate limpid surfaces, I would say crystalline, although mixed and watery, with more dense, pure and opaque cuts, flashing and rigid.
Hers is a brushstroke that constructs. Strokes overlaid in parallel cover their portion of paper with a transparency. It continues from one to the next, until they constitute a comfortable
space, a shelter for our gaze. The function of it, in Vicky Uslé’s words, would be “to isolate, to protect, but breathing”.
Paper grants a freedom and intimacy that canvas, even that of small format, rarely knows. This intimacy Vicky Uslé understands well, with what I believe to be a peculiar combination of humility and courage, which impels her to bare her feelings, reflecting which simple motivations and existences constitute the synapsis between people, and which are the experiences in which human beings converge. In this point, the empathy of the viewer with that which they are offered to see, is direct and immediate.
Two final medium size drawings point at a new direction or path for explorations. These create, in one case, more defined objects, and in the other, a deliquescent expansion that escapes the borders of a geometric structure. Both are to me more enigmatic that the drawings surrounding them. As though the reduction of forms and the near inexistence of colours revealed, like Paul Klee wanted, what is invisible in the visible.
June 2012
Valentina Casacchia
As Proust, Joyce and Bergson taught us, the human mind is populated by a continuous flux of sense perceptions, thoughts, feelings, and memories. Each time that a stimulus touches this flux, new imagery occurs. Many pages have been written around this concept, and dozens of art historians have transposed this complex concept in the visions that artists have painted throughout centuries. However, I still believe (and I think I am not alone in this) that the mystery of a colored surface and a single brush stroke remains unresolved.
The works of Vicky Uslé are profound reflections on the nature of art, tradition, and the artists gaze. They focus on geometric and abstract forms, and also utilize the power of color as the fundamental component of creating vision.
And she moves in two complementary directions:
The little colored bricks through which she structures the composition lead us to configure the surface as a dynamic space, with walls, obstacles, and doors that can always be faced, crossed, and turned. Also, by leaving the composition open, she proposes the option of moving one way or another, choosing the horizon we prefer, and walking through the white surface as we desire.
Now, the white spaces:
Are they the pauses one may take while on an imaginary path? Are they the negatives of the walls and shapes she has built? Are they a flowing ground were invisible forces are pulled out and returned to our spectrum? They could be all of this at the same time. I like to think they are "enjambements" in a poem. Voluntary interruption. Definitely these little colored structures dancing over a white background, remind us of a poem, haikus, with comas, accents, rhymes, and generations of intuitions. So, as suggested by the Symbolists and as Roland Barthes stated, the white page claims its meaning.
Then the colors:
Giving that vision is an active process, we know that: the reconstruction of an image occurs in the brain; that the perception is broken down and processed by different visual areas; that there are neurons specialized in this complex development. For example, with regard to the complementary colors, if these neurons are excited by red, they are inhibited by green; those who capture yellow are unable to perceive green, as well as those appointed to capture white, can not catch black. Therefore, perception of space and form, are caused almost exclusively by differences in brightness of color and not from the color itself. This concept allowed Picasso, during his blue period, to paint only with blue tones without making us lose the perception of form, and also allowed Klee to paint only in shades of brown.
As it is known, the images formed in our brains are not a photographic reproduction of reality, but a processing and an interpretation of different shades of light emanating from the pigments to our brain, which also proceed through memory, completing the details that we do not ask for, finishing the unfinished, channeling automatically to a predetermined area of visual neurons and specific detection of the blue or gray color of the sky.
Color is the first thing that the brain perceives, then shapes, then movement.
But what happens if instead of blue, the painter paints the sky red or yellow? Or the grass black? Or a cloud green? The colors are wrong. These questions create what might be called an effect derailment, a détournement, a surprise and a neural placement that exponentially increases the structural characteristic of the art: the ambiguity. In essence, the ambiguity of art presupposes a sensory surprise, a kind of vertigo that seizes us when art comes into conflict with the ordinary visual experience.
The colors through which Vicky explores and connects the elements of her compositions are a delicate, sensitive, and very feminine spread. The suggested architectonic structures turn into ethereal perfumes, sensual weight-less veils at a more attentive glance. By sounding as an instrument, they singularly move between intimacy and evidence, lightness and intensity, synthesizing an individual experience, a memory, a taste, a landscape.
If, in the big revolution of contemporary art, from Cezanne on, the important has become, more and more, the visualization versus the representation, I think that the works of Vicky Uslé, reconnects with this long and hoary tradition, bringing to the table a new position, behind a beautiful creation.
Published in the book Building Saja, 2012
Enrique Juncosa
“Outside there was no wind at all, with not even the
sound of a breeze stirring in the pines to be heard.
Nevertheless, one was distinctively aware of the expanse
of forest and mountain”.
Yukio Mishima
‘Building Saja’, a substantial show of recent works on paper by Victoria Uslé, is striking in two ways: firstly, for the sensations of optimism and generosity it inspires, visible in the sheer inventiveness of a cornucopia of abstract motifs, and secondly, in the certainty and determination with which the project has come to fruition. Fourteen of the works were made some time ago, forming part of a previous exhibition entitled Into Habitats. Now, the series has been significantly expanded, having evolved over a period where the artist was pregnant with her first daughter (who she named ‘Saja’). Thus, the majority of these works (in total there are more than forty) have emerged from a time that has been particularly fertile and positive for the artist, in more ways than one.
The works are all oil on paper in four distinct formats ranging from 20 x 23 cm at their smallest to 43 x 35 cm for the larger ones. In some cases, a final detail has been added in acrylic. Taken as a whole, these works operate like drawings. They possess the intrinsic qualities of the medium through their spontaneity, dynamism, freedom, fluidity or lightness, even if some are particularly complex in form and/or in colour. For Victoria Uslé, like other abstract artists such as Terry Winters or Helmut Dorner, working on paper can be described as a laboratory of sorts, where imagery is generated and ideas are worked through. The end result is a bank of visual data.
The majority of abstract painters who emerged after Minimalism were preoccupied with the semantic capabilities of painting, using the medium’s own syntax as a point of departure. The emphasis in these works is fairly well divided between formal innovation and meaning, perhaps veering more towards the former. Also, some painters incorporated new motifs from the world of science into their vocabularies, i.e. from mathematics and molecular biology to cybernetics, and also from other cultures. This is how Peter Halley’s work, for example, has been interpreted, where reference is often made to cells and the difficulty of
communication, both socio-politically and psychologically. The same is the case with Philip Taaffe, who uses ornamental motifs and botanical imagery in his work for their ecological as well as their multicultural resonances. Victoria Uslé, on the other hand, belongs to a tradition that insists on the poetic potential of abstraction, which lends painting, in the best of cases, the capacity to be a form of knowledge in itself, without claiming to have any other purpose.
The most complex works in the current group give the impression that much effort went into their creation, but also a certain deliberation and delight. Space is refractory and constructed through repeated brushstrokes, as if, at times, depicting something concrete or specific. Images are compiled in a way that could be described as modular or architectural. I find it telling that the artist’s own text for the Into Habitats exhibition catalogue begins with a Michael Hansell phrase which says: ‘build a nest and you will change the world’. The image of a nest seems particularly appropriate for describing not only the personal situation of the artist until quite recently, but also as a metaphor for interpreting the works and the process of their execution, and even for all creation in general.
Many of the works in this exhibition could expand to form more complex systems, but equally could retract and perhaps even disappear. Some are highly advanced and heavily worked, while others are extremely simple. We encounter organic or playful elements, but also, more recently, geometric forms of an analytical nature. All float and are articulated within an empty and clearly meta-linguistic space, continuously folding in on themselves like the changing forms of a kaleidoscope. In her text, Victoria Uslé uses the word ‘membrane’ and, in effect, her imagery is a record of the moment in which an idea and a gesture created them. There is also something choreographic to the works with their rhythmic repetition of forms over the blank stage of the paper background. The paintbrush shifts and turns, at times in on itself, and this rotation describes a trajectory or space which can be circular but also zigzagged.
Appropriately, the drawings are untitled, underlining their abstract nature. Approximately half of them are constructed using repeated brushstrokes that create distinct bands or intensities of colour, reminiscent perhaps of the ever rich and fascinating plumage of birds. Nevertheless, these forms also suggest cut-outs which could be arranged to create volume or architectural elevations. Sometimes they are simple boxes, or perhaps decorative paper lanterns, and in other instances, complex maps. However, the feeling of depth is perhaps already generated by the simultaneous use of different perspectives or the superimposition of forms, strokes and colours. In the text mentioned above, Victoria Uslé references Buckminster Fuller, inventor of the geodesic dome who based his architectural and engineering works on mathematical and scientific parameters.
Victoria Uslé creates dynamic, pulsating spaces which always seem on the verge of instability. Her brush moves like wisps of smoke in the still air, obeying secret rules. The artist opens up new horizons for us which are always subjective, open and unfamiliar. That said, we do not find ourselves being led into hostile territory. On the contrary, hers is very much a friendly world, like an unexpected inn on a long journey or a particularly beautiful place in a forest in which to rest a while in
wonder – and indeed Saja is also the name of a river and a natural park in the Cantabrian mountains, containing the largest expanse of beech trees in Europe. The rhetoric of forests becomes the rhetoric of drawings.
Victoria Uslé’s drawings invite us to contemplate the actions and ideas behind their creation. For example, one can imagine that the final orientation of a work, i.e. portrait or landscape, was not necessarily the way it started out. Some of the drawings create dragging, sweeping paths rather than spaces, like comet or pheasant tails. In others, one glimpses folding screens, protective roofs, circuits, diagrams, musical notes, introspective viewing points, sources of energy… Ultimately, perhaps they form an entire world of possible genetic systems.
Some of the drawings are wonderfully unique. One of them, in landscape format, shows a pink horizontal shape made with two gestures of the brush, one which traverses the width of the page, and a second stroke applied over the first and covering only a quarter of the distance. The latter is more intense and gives the image some depth, as if we were looking at two heads of an island forming a bay. However, two pairs of little black squares situated in the upper left of the pink form, like two pairs of eyes or a string of windows, negate this landscape reading and instead suggest the idea of fish with double vision, or a spaceship.
In another of these singular works, we see a column of five blue forms balanced precariously on another form like a finger or a branch, almost like some juggler’s final flourish. Another work is a system of floating, tied ribbons, almost proud of their inscrutability. In yet another, a series of coloured ovals appears between vertical lines, like balloons in a lightning storm. There are various works depicting parallel lines of colour and then others with triangles. In another drawing we see three Brancusi-like columns of differing heights standing side by side, suggesting a family, or pared down totem poles in a post-industrial world. However, it should be remembered that all of these works are always abstract. Thus they speak, in reality, of expansions, volumes, structures, the nature of pictorial language, etc. although not necessarily focusing on any one of these things. They describe and explore a world of harvesting and of quiet reflection and pauses, but also of relaxation, amusement and delight.
All of these self-generating forms and circuits that shift and float describe balance, parameters, horizons, and all kinds of spaces (conceptual, aerial, liquid, etc.) and suggest a detailed analysis of identity and relationships. Everything is set in motion through a desire for order, for guidance, for self-knowledge in short. It also behaves in a way that is conscious of its limits. This process, which is undoubtedly generated by desire, is already a form of pleasure in itself, an end as well as a means. Victoria Uslé’s drawings have the perfect beauty of Japanese gardens. An initial, superficial view might give us the impression of mounting a wild horse at the entrance to a labyrinth but let us not be mistaken. We are at a serene and broad affirmation of the centre.
Published in the book Building Saja, 2012
Translated by Jonathan Brennan
Ismael Teira – Vicky Uslé
The concept of the garden somehow permeates the paintings in Light and Passage. Artificial, domesticated, limited, and – in a way – safe and secure, the garden stands out as a pleasant place, a locus amoenus that is tinged – in accordance with the Judeo-Christian tradition – with Edenic references.
The nature of a garden is preserved from what stands outside – as in the medieval hortus conclusus – and serves as refuge from the locus horridus, that is, from places that are dangerous and hostile to the human species, as the pandemic metropolis is today and the dark, vermin-plagued jungles were in other times.
Vicky Uslé, however, proposes a pleasant yet passionate stroll through each of the “surprising details” of our biotope.
The exhibition’s title itself, Light and Passage, may conjure up two important questions regarding the morphology of the garden. On the one hand, the fact that it is a place of light, since darkness would associate it with the locus horridus. On the other, the possibility if offers for taking a stroll, for walking in safety. Does the title include any other references or motivations?
Yes, light is the beginning, and it’s almost everything. It helps us to see forms, rhythms and colours, and trust they are there, in front of us, favouring the ideas they gift us. They somehow remain inside us, they feed us and help us grow, and create an inner and outer “space of our own”: that is how plants grow. But, knowing as we do that our growth gives rise to new ideas, new forms and words, sometimes sharply defined but generally tangled up in a kind of wild forest-garden, we must approach it quietly, in order to clear it without doing harm.
My work is sometimes associated with the idea of landscape, perhaps because of its elements of colour, structure, rhythm and primordially organic gestures; but in my understanding, landscape as a genre must frame nature such as it is perceived, depicted and imagined. I see my work as resulting from the action and interaction of natural factors and human factors, with all that such a relationship carries with it: bonds, humanity, interaction, life experiences..., childhood.
My “passage” emerges from that twofold process of slowly disentangling and sorting things, so that something can then be made out of that tangle, and put forth as a proposal. So it’s a process in a state of growth, a process that takes place within that permanent interaction between society and nature; it’s a land of passage, a humanly felt passage, and a leftover deriving from the procedural representation of the process itself.
I clear my passage in a forest, in a city, in the studio. I soak up the exuberant gardens that appear before me, and bring them towards the inside of myself. The paths I open up as I move forward, going deeper, are usually the ones I’m most interested in. Their interest lies precisely in the fact that I’m on a voyage of discovery, moving ever further forward, without quite knowing where I’m being led. I might find a trail, a sign, or a warren.
If I didn’t dare to stray from the safety of the beaten track, I’d get complacent, and complacency would interfere with my process of discovery. The path is also wild, and can be hostile, because of the inducements, the eagerness, and the risk it entails.
Light also leads us to thought and contemplation, to the observation of the “places and ideas” that take shape in the half-light, in the light that may be vibrant or tenuous, and cause sparks to fly. The more of these there are, the greater is the doubt, the more the useful questions that arise, to strengthen us in our odyssey towards a place of reunion, in the course of an intense conversation with painting. It’s landscape as a process of becoming and as a place of passage, in which the by-product is always painting.
According to philosopher Alain Roger, two types of artialisation occur in the contemplation of nature: the first is direct, and happens in situ; the second is indirect, and happens in visu. What contexts or circumstances have served you as an inducement as regards the former?
For a start, I think that being in touch with nature from a very early age has strongly influenced me. I lived in an old mill on the Miera River, and had the run of the surrounding country, where I would dash about, and splash in the water, and discover untold “surprising details” of nature: the insects, the little animals, the leaves and the rocks... At dusk it was almost a daily routine for us to take a swim in the river, and I always found it moving to watch the dying light of the sun as it tinged the rocks with warm hues, and slid silently over the enormous boulders that merged with the sky on either side of the river.
The need to move, wherever one may be, is imperative. It is essential to set in motion what we see, and what we develop in the course of that vital passage through memory and the practice of painting. Everything is bound up with everything else, and produces that resulting, leftover body of stuff. The magic of movement appears in the water of a river, as things are shaded and then unveiled; the mud is hidden and revealed, and there are the singular shapes of the leaves, the pebbles, the branches dragged along by the current, and now and then a daring trout, who might not just be daring but also know that our shadow could never catch it.
Afterwards, in the studio, other things happen. The soul grows calm again, and waits for a sparkle. I always remember when we came out of the water, I was wrapped in an enormous towel, and would always beg for a last look at the fading reflections that the sun gave us when it said goodbye, before taking itself off to bed and saying, “See you tomorrow!”
Now, when I enter the studio, I often remember two of the feelings I had then: on the one hand, a certain sadness, and on the other, a certain joy. I would return home, wrapped in my towel, and I was full of questions, and not feeling much like supper. Art, I now think, also feeds us; but at the time I only felt emotions, and stored them away inside me.
In Berlin, while I was looking at some of the paintings of G. D. Friedrich, I felt what some historians have tried to define as “the sublime”. There was something like that in those pictures: the light moved slowly towards the horizon, and a part of ourselves seemed to move with it. The works were strange, not just full of beauty – and it was something beyond beauty that moved me; it was that overwhelming, and maybe also inevitable, sense of things sliding away. A kind of dispossessed beauty that transcends objects, goes beyond what is material, and becomes pure moving emotion: a passage that moves towards the immense.
Those concepts of in situ and in visu I take into the studio with me, into my workshop, because that’s where I let things settle, and look for answers. It doesn’t matter where you are, the sparkle emerges, and sparks emerge too, and that’s what matters to me. What my eyes single out, where they take me, where they come to rest – I try to respect that. My surroundings enrich my senses and my memory, and it’s like a primordial cocktail which I’m open to, which I try to nurture before releasing it through my hands.
To me, the process of interiorising things is like pouring them slowly through a strainer, and that helps us to purify other processes that have “scratched” (or dented) our “anima”. What we do in the studio is blend silence and time, making our imaginarium grow. It’s a vital and a mental process, a gradual process of becoming ourselves and being moulded through change, through transition, as part of unrecoverable transit, as experience.
Today, when distances no longer exist and what is remote is no longer so far away, it becomes increasingly necessary to learn the value of every path, every passage, every road. But the experience of the studio is also substantial, and generates matter, like a brick that is, at the same time, a document. The question is how to record and make true what we give shape to, and call – sometimes unwittingly – our art.
To finish, a poem by Emily Dickinson comes to mind:
Silence is all we dread.
There’s Ransom in a Voice –
But Silence is Infinity.
Himself have not a face.
Published in Makma, March 9, 2021