May 5 to June 18, 2016
547 W. 25th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 242 7727

Spanish painter Juan Uslé’s recent work, now on view at Cheim & Read, bears an inseparable connection with environmental conditions experienced out of doors, and out of an urban scape, perhaps. That low, raking illumination at dusk, the change physically in our receptiveness to color and tonal contrasts when surrounded by fading light in the transition from day to night, are all more intense, slower, and more subtle away from the noise and artificial illumination of the city. I say “perhaps” because in the city there is that incredible moment when fading natural light combines with electric light. All of this, it seems, both informs and is contained in, these new canvases.

There are only three sizes of canvas present, SOÑE QUE REVELABAS (COLORADO) (2016) is an example of a series of paintings begun in 1997 and is rendered in the largest size. The other paintings are considerably smaller, at 24 by 18 inches and 18 by 12 inches, respectively, and also belong to longstanding series in their own right. The earlier paintings often comprised vertical as well as horizontal brush marks that moved and stopped, moved and stopped, sequentially, to the rhythm of the artist’s heartbeat. These paintings, when made in New York are frequently made at night when the city is somewhat quieter, and the heartbeat can be felt in the silence, varying as it does, sometimes faster, sometimes slower, over time. At 120 by 89 inches, the field of this painting visibly absorbs light and reflects it at different intervals. The light reflected is modified by the paint that covers a prepped gessoed surface in uneven — fluid, abrupt or staggered — rhythms. The gradations recall the restless, wrist-driven, backgrounds of Goya’s Los caprichos (1797–1798) or the apparently black surroundings of Velázquez’s Cristo Crucificado (1632). The Velázquez is 98 by 67 inches, a large painting that presents an image of Christ on the cross in an isolated and classical contrapposto posture The apparently black surroundings, or ground, of the figure are not actually black but a kind of unfathomable green black consisting of a multitude of brush strokes that accumulate and with their different directions pulse and variegate the light that falls onto the painted surface. It is a surface alive with the repetitions of Velázquez’s hand in motion in a way like the stepped movement of Uslé’s hand as it tracks across a painting.

In Kayak (Aral 11) (2015), like the other small paintings here, demands its share of wall space. In regarding the space afforded between paintings in the installation, it comes as no surprise that the smaller works require as much wall space as large works. In Kayak shares the horizontal repetitions, each one above the next, of SOÑE QUE REVELABAS (COLARADO). However, the change in scale takes us closer to the painting in a different way, the view now close, like a person is close to the water in an actual kayak, something Uslé experiences regularly. Between each band of black horizontal translucent brush strokes that deposit the pigment loaded into a medium of vinyl at intervals, like silt, are lines of opaque paint of various colors. The final, bottom passage, though, is not, as might be expected, more translucent paint, but instead another band, this time of opaque black. One’s eyes have to adjust as if to perceive a shadow or afterimage. This increases the complexity of this painting in denying expectation, both in beauty and structure, exponentially.

In part three of George Kubler’s book The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things (1962), titled “The Propagation of Things,” Kubler writes:

The occurrence of things is governed by our changing attitude to the process of invention, repetition, and discard. Without invention there would be only stale routine. Without copying there would never be enough of any man-made thing, and without waste or discard too many things would outlast their usefulness. Our attitudes towards these processes are themselves in constant change, so that we confront the double difficulty of charting changes in things, together with tracing the change in ideas about change.

He goes on to state that a condition of the present is the acceptance of continual change. It is this that Uslé’s paintings embody, even celebrate, successfully, neither avoiding repetition nor denying difference. All the paintings in this exhibition are part of larger series, and each painting is assertively particular despite, or one could say because of sharing a continuity of formal elements.

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Devotees of abstract painting have ample evidence that it thrives in New York these days. Two exhibitions by prominent Europeans not seen here so often demonstrate abstraction is riding high elsewhere, too.

The Spaniard, Juan Uslé, and the Swiss, Silvia Bächli are both artists in their early fifties. Mr. Uslé, who has been the subject of museum exhibitions in Málaga, Ghent, Dublin and Madrid in recent years, is having his first New York show since 2002. And Ms. Bächli, who staged a mid-career retrospective at the Pompidou Center in Paris last year, and has had museum shows in Porto, Geneva and Melbourne, is having her first show here since 1998.

Despite different approaches towards scale, texture and color, a common attitude pervades each artist’s style that isolates a cool tension between involvedness and restraint. Both occupy a tipping point between reticence and verve. And, as befits artists who seem centrally concerned with time and with the dynamics of stasis and flux, there is a watery aspect to the work — in her case, thanks to the choice of gouache or india ink as medium: in his, in a preference for a layering of veils.

Mr. Uslé is an artist who has developed a highly characteristic, almost trademark, personal notation without allowing this to reduce his output to a formula. He works in bands of color that are applied not in a continuous brushstroke but instead in a drag of close-knit pleats. The look can be a bit like the waves of light on a vinyl record, and the paintings are in fact made with vinyl, dispersion and dry pigment.

His method produces an intriguing result; in painterly terms, it must have been put down with slow deliberation, but the effect on the eye is of rapidity, with the overlaps shimmering. It is a very odd mix of legato and staccato, like machine gun fire, except the intervals are anything but mechanical. It looks as if the brush has been dragged in a jerking stop-go motion to produce this effect. The sense at once of the repetitive and the handmade can put you in mind of ethnic weaving.

A small painting like “La Camara Occulta” (2007) recalls the juxtaposed grids that dominated his 2002 show at Cheim & Read, with the canvas divided into sections where bands follow the vertical or the horizontal. The sense is of a cropped view of an expansive continuity of these grids, with fairly arbitrary jumps in color and density. In a much cooler, less opulent, less intentional way, this division of the canvas recalls Sean Scully.

Another, more illustrious forebear in this sense of the agitated grid was Mondrian in his late, New York period of such paintings as “Broadway Boogie Woogie.” Since the late 1980s, Mr. Uslé has been spending part of the year working in New York and is openly influenced by the gridular energy of the city, combined, however, with folk sources.

In contrast to his earlier New York show, Mr. Uslé has left behind a quilt-like approach to picture building. The 2002 show had a strong compositional unity that encouraged the viewer to look for subtle variations. This new show opts for exuberant variety. No longer restricted to verticals and horizontals, Mr. Uslé has started to take his bands for serpentine walks around the canvas in works like “In Verso” (2007), with its loops and hairpins of subtly contrasting bright reds against white (an almost Constructivist palette) and “Cada Vez Mas Cerca” (2006–07). In this latter work, two sets of interlocking contours in scaled tones, respectively, of blues and browns, are suggestive of some kind of organic process, akin, for instance, to a cross section of tree trunk — without literally looking like one.

Another departure in these new works is that in addition to his characteristic bands, forming a kind of fugal relationship with them on a secondary picture plane, are thin, bright continuously applied color lines, as in “Miron,” (2006–07) a chirpy pack of vertical stripes.

Mr. Uslé’s fresh, lively body of painting seems to draw its energy equally from an acute, observed sense of the jolts and rhythms of nature and culture, on the one hand, and on the other the sheer adventure of its making.

Almost as if conforming to national stereotypes, where the Spanish Mr. Uslé is primitive, robust, visceral, and colorful, the Swiss Ms. Bächli is neat, cool, analytical, and restrained. But there is a similar mix of internal and external dynamics in her show of works on paper at Peter Freeman.

Her imagery is almost forcefully diverse. Where Mr. Uslé’s concern is with phenomena, Ms. Bächli focuses on things. But her richly intriguing approach to things is phenomenological.

There are overtly figurative pieces such as a closely cropped view of the upper middle of a woman’s body, or three studies of a chestnut (most of her works are Untitled, all 2007). Others are more resolutely abstract, with say a vertical bar along the left edge of a page with a wobbling horizontal extending to the right. Some nestle between abstraction and representation, like the radically cropped thing in the first image of the show that while looking like something very specific is quite illegible. Or rather, in the manner of the cloud discussed by Hamlet and Polonius, could read as a section of a cottage with a garden wall, or equally the beak of a bird. Or as a “pure” abstraction.

The largest two pieces in the show, at roughly 6-1/2 by 5 feet each, are pattern oriented. “Line 39” is an erratic plaid, in which wayward lines seem resistant to capture without coming across as either feeble or febrile in the process. “Untitled 27” and “Untitled 28” each has a packed-in cluster of irregular lengths of thick strokes of varying density hanging from the top of the page. To describe these lines as fibers or spaghetti is merely to have a way to designate the quality of marks — the impact is sensual rather than suggestive.

To describe the different degrees of legibility in this show might give the impression of a linguistic, conceptualist approach. But the emotional tenor of the show is actually — despite the absence of color and the suppression of brushstroke — quite painterly. It is about sensations of looking and experiencing rather than sights or experiences per se, and it is this that makes the show abstract.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, February 21, 2008

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