From a young age, Uslé showed a great interest in art and he studied at the San Carlos School of Fine Arts in Valencia, from which he graduated in 1977. During his early years as an artist, he worked mainly with figurative drawings and paintings, but in the mid-80s he began to experiment with abstract art. Inspired by music and literature, his works often combine organic and geometric shapes in layers of vibrant colour.
In the early 1990s, Uslé moved to New York, where his style evolved towards a more fluid and gestural abstraction, using loose brushstrokes and dynamic compositions.
In 1997, he began the series entitled “Soñé que revelabas” (I Dreamt that You Revealed), which has given birth to many large-format vertical works in which Uslé, as so many artists have done throughout history, sets in motion a variation on the same theme in which he plays very successfully with the combination of colours. As the artist explains, “painting these pictures is like filling the world with silence, from the void, to also give meaning to at least one space, a large and rather generous space, chosen for that purpose. It is like a cleansing exercise, a search for emptiness, starting from a biological reference point. Maybe I do this because our vision is too impure and sometimes we are tormented by images. We are so overloaded with images that we breathe, we, increasingly, live inside a kind of neural Times Square ”1.
Uslé maintains a strong bond with his homeland, returning frequently to work in his studio in Saro, a small village in the mountains of Cantabria. Throughout his career, he has continued to explore new techniques and forms of expression in his art, remaining true to his unique vision, but always constantly evolving.
Uslé has been recognised with numerous awards and honours, including the Spanish National Prize for Plastic Arts in 2014.
The Hortensia Herrero collection has one work by Juan Uslé belonging to his well-known series “I Dreamt that You Revealed”
