JUAN USLÉ
Santander,(Spain) 1954 
He started studying at the Escuela de Bellas Artes de San Carlos in Valencia in 1973. Two years later he began working with Victoria Civera, alternating photography, photomontage and painting. In 1978 painting became the main focus in his work, strongly influenced by American Abstract Expressionism, and that year he began teaching plastic expression at the University of Santander. His first solo exhibitions (Museo Municipal de Bellas Artes de Santander and Galería Ruiz Castillo in Madrid, both in 1981) presented work evolving towards an abstraction that was more complex on a formal plane, combining landscape –in a dramatic Expressionist style- and autobiographical touches in the small-format series that he produced in the mid-eighties –Los trabajos y los días (Work and Days), Camino del llano (Path on the Plain), Andara-Tánger (Andara-Tangier). In 1985 his first American exhibition opened as part of the Currents series organised by the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, and the following year he was awarded a grant that took him to New York. His first series in New York –Williamsburg and Los últimos sueños del Capitán Nemo (Captain Nemo’s Last Dreams)- indicated his interest in merely pictorial languages, focusing especially on texture, which was more powerful than the drawing, and colour, which was of great intensity (although there was no lack of paintings with black palettes). These devices were used to create paintings of imagined landscapes. In 1988 his first solo exhibition in New York was held at the Farideh Cadot Gallery. In the transition towards the nineties his painting became more delicate, with more subtle gestures, leading to a subtle change in his palette, which became brighter and more luminous. Above all, there was the introduction of the grid as a compositional pattern in his work througout the decade, sometimes as a referential form and structure (city or buildings), and sometimes enabling him to play with fragments, with the excitement of what was hidden. It was during the nineties that his work became known internationally, with regular exhibitions both in the United States and in Europe. In 1996 he had a major exhibition at the Museu d’Art Contemporani in Barcelona, and also his first exhibition in Los Angeles, at L.A. Louver. After the retrospective at the IVAM in 1997 he exhibited in group shows with David Salle and Victoria Civera. In the year 2000 Santander was the setting for a wide-ranging exhibition of his work.