Juan Usle
23 Apr - 11 Jun 2009
JUAN USLÉ
"Malatadas"
April 23 - June 11, 2009
Coloring in the lines
David Pagel
Strictly speaking, line and color are the two main ingredients in Juan Usle’s visually delicious paintings. Shape and texture contribute to the overall impact of his user-friendly images, but the roles these formal features play are secondary – entirely reliant upon what Usle does with line and color. And what he does with them turns a very long history of the impressive ways other painters have used these pictorial elements upside-down and inside-out. This leaves viewers free to see things differently, with fresh eyes, as it were, old habits and conventional restrictions having fallen away so that the world, once again, looks new, curious, and beautiful: an imaginatively engaging place where wisdom and mystery are not opposed, pleasure and analysis go hand-in-glove, and there’s always more to see – not because you missed it the first time, but because the visible world is so much richer and denser and more nuanced and fascinating than the comparatively rudimentary visual codes into which it must be translated before it can even be spoken of, much less written about.
Long before Usle managed to make line and color pirouette around each other like nobody’s business, in a dizzying dance that allowed each to promiscuously perform the other’s function (while it did its own resplendent thing, multitasking – or switch-hitting – with the best of them), these two formal elements were set at cross purposes. They were held not only far apart in terms of sensibility and impulse, but in philosophical, metaphysical, and bitter opposition. In late seventeenth-century France, a fierce battle emerged between line and color, between the followers of Poussin and the followers of Reubens.
On the one side was the priority of drawing. Its proponents insisted that line divided chaos from meaning, bringing order and clarity and sense out of emptiness or nothingness, in a positively Godly fashion. According to them, the artist’s touch provided the most intimate, direct, and immediate access to his mind, soul, creativity, genius, and originality, wherein the true beauty of existence resided. This belief still prevails today, with drawings commonly treated as the swiftest and straightest path to an artist’s ideas and intentions.
On the other side was color, which the supporters of linearity disparaged as cosmetic, superficial, inessential, feminine, emotional, and uncontrollable: suitable for second-rate citizens and second-class distractions but not really up to task of upholding the seriousness of real art, whose job it was to deliver deep knowledge and lasting insight. Although Reubens and his supporters did not buy into such cut-and-dried thinking or compartmentalized looking, the cultural values that dominated their day (and, until very recently, much of ours) disparaged their insistence that color was essential. Instead, color was treated as being little more than an incidental extra, better eliminated because it confused rather than clarified, seduced rather than satisfied, distracted rather than delivered.
This fundamental opposition between line and color recalled and played off of a similar controversy that emerged in Italy in the sixteenth century, when draftsmanship and linearity from such Tuscan artists as Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael were contrasted to and set against the work of such hedonistic colorists from Venice as Giorgione and Titian. And it has not gone away. It can be seen in the Impressionists’ efforts to make an art entirely out of visual sensation. It is visible in the Post-Impressionists’ swift return to thickly painted contours, gritty materiality, and over-wrought, often seething emotionalism, all of which fed and fueled Expressionism and its offshoot, Surrealism. Color pretty much disappeared from Cubism, which put a priority on cold calculation and cerebral analysis. And it did not play a big role in Dada or Conceptualism, Arte Povera or Nouveau Realisme. Color did manage to make something of a comeback in American Abstract Expressionism, formalist abstraction, and Color Field painting, but only as an antidote to the dominance of line, rationality, and intellect, all of which played a more dominant part of Minimalism, post-Minimalism, and much of Post-Modernism’s largely academic formats.
Usle’s paintings stand out against this backdrop because they treat line and color equally: as complicitous components whose sympathies and synergies are far more compelling than their differences, whose parallels and overlaps are infinitely more fascinating than their distinctions, and whose permeable borders and slippery similarities are part and parcel of an expansive whole that is so much greater than the sum of its parts that it becomes something boundless, infective, sublime, in its own idiosyncratic way: a shimmering instance of those exquisitely unexpected moments when everything simply falls into place – serendipitously, casually, and matter-of-factly, despite our own best intentions and through no fault of our own. When this happens, mundane, pedestrian reality suddenly shifts from numbing drudgery and plodding business-as-usual to something lovely, exciting, and alive – while remaining ordinary, common, and down-to-earth, not to mention unspecialized, unpretentious, and readily accessible. It’s a precarious balance that Usle strikes with offhand aplomb, infusing that certain je ne sais quoi we love in life into paintings so open-ended that there’s something for everyone in their simple compositions, quotidian colors, and humming, funky rhythms.
The first thing Usle does in his paintings is get his self out of the way. There’s nothing special about his lines. They are not expressive. They are not singular. They are not inimitable signatures that convey the uniqueness of his individual ego. Most important, they never pretend to deliver to viewers a privileged view of his interior life, the privatized, psychological make-up of the traumatized self that has been so much a part of modern art, ever since Romanticism prioritized subjectivity, Expressionism aligned the beleaguered individual with every meaning-laden gesture in his work, and abstraction generalized this deeply Freudian approach, interpreting each artistic mark as evidence of childhood conflict, adult anxiety, and the combustible combination of the two potentially incendiary elements. In contrast, Usle’s lines are cool, matter-of-fact, and uninflected by such high-flying dramaturgy, operatic bombastic, and melodramatic intrigue. None takes you back to the unique proclivities of his touch, fetishizing a singular, fingerprint-style of mark-making.
Time and again, Usle begins his little, endearingly intimate yet experientially big paintings by making marks that appear to be no more complicated, aestheticized, or loaded with meaning than the tally-marks prisoners make on the walls of their cells, in old, black-and-white movies, as they count off their days of confinement, patiently waiting for something dramatic – and transformative – to happen. On first glance, such paintings as Nilo Negro, El Fondo de tus Ojos, Cerca de los Geisers, Again the Cubas, and Mambru seem to consist of row upon row of short, vertical marks – all handmade and thus distinct from one another, yet far less important for their differences than for their overall, accumulative impact: the sense that they record slowly built-up accretions of time, the day-in and day-out regularity of the same thing done again and again, as weeks become months, months become years, and years turn into a lifetime – which suddenly seems fleeting. But to look carefully at these paintings is to see that Usle’s tally-like marks have not been made singularly. More important, they do not even record the vertical, top-to-bottom movement of a marking tool (pen, pencil, or brush) in the artist’s hand. Each row of approximately eight-centimeter-long marks was made with a squeegee pulling a load of liquid paint horizontally across the canvas, sometimes swiftly, sometimes slowly, yet always with varying amounts of pressure, resulting in the jittery, quivery interruptions that divide this line into smaller lines, each of which runs across its width. To be clear, Usle paints wide, horizontal lines that consist of sequences of short vertical lines. The compositional bedrock of his paintings is a series of vertically striated horizontal bands, each comprised of gently gradated tints of subtly modulated colors that fade from dark to light or intensify in saturation, from light to dark. El Principio and Rubicon are essentially no different, their main distinguishing features being that the wide bands are oriented vertically, in the first, and circularly, like nesting arcs, in the second.
Usle’s striated bands generate multi-directional movements. To follow one requires that your eyes move both horizontally – in long, smooth sweeps – and vertically – in swift, up-and-down zips. It isn’t difficult to do both simultaneously. But it is out of the ordinary, an emblematic instance of bodily capacities or physical talents the mind is not accustomed to – or not accustomed to acknowledging – especially when it is more commonly used to filter out and simplify, in the interest of making a little space for itself in the overwhelming onslaught of visual stimulation that is the image glut of modern life. No stranger to the crazy pace of modern life, Usle makes paintings that do not shy away from its incessant visual barrage. Instead, his softly sizzling works sensitize our eyes and minds to the subtleties of visual stimulation, generously inviting us to delight in the perceptual nuances that are possible when acute attentiveness is brought to the seemingly simplest of things.
Such complex, criss-crossing movements figure prominently in his large paintings, Espía de Palabras and Perdida en Bogota, forming, in the first, a solid base of bright orange, atop of which sits a fractured expanse of unraveling strands, staccato rhythms, dissonant diagonals, and broken spaces, and, in the second, a light to dark compression of earthy, ethereal browns that forms the ground for meandering, red and white doodles, several stray fragments, and a window-like opening onto deep space.
Usle’s paintings in which these striated bands do not dominate deploy a host of other mediated moves that put similar, unbridgeable distance between the artist’s self-signifying touch and the optical movements the lines generate. Three of the smallest, Repliegue (Día), Repliegue (Noche), and Sinuoso, resemble photographic close-ups or magnified enlargements of the striated lines that figure so prominently in Usle’s oeuvre. In all three, the shifts or kinks are exaggerated or zoomed in on so that each has the architectural solidity and illusionistic impact of a three-dimensional form, its heft and volume, or warp and woof, a force to be reckoned with. At twice their size, Las Navajas and Bonjour Monsieur Nemo translate the fragmented, cut-and-paste physicality of classic, pre-digital collage to abstract painting, treating spindly tendrils of color as if they had more in common with bits of trimmed paper than taped-off painterly applications, and positioning painterly passages as if they overlapped one another, like parts of pages glued over one another. In the show’s largest work, La Novia de Belchite and its freewheeling partner, the horizontal El Gran Patinador, Usle loosens lines and lets them run every which way. The big red painting is a sort of post-digital meditation on dissolution and directionlessness, its melting grid recalling tautness and order only to suggest that such structure and consistency are inadequate to the task of capturing the complexity of the virtual world’s whiplash movements – not to mention the glitches in the transmitted info, which interrupt the fluidity of the painting’s surface like rips in reality’s fabric or tokens of those unforgettable things that don’t fit into the pre-planned program. The big horizontal painting on an opaque white ground that does not quite hide what it covers is an instructive essay on the various ways Usle deploys line. It’s a concise, encyclopedic guide to every type of line in all the other paintings, each laid out in its own space to reveal its slippery, multi-directional movements, squiggly energy, quiet dynamism, and cool heat.
Suffice it to say that in Usle’s hands the practice of drawing is not what it used to be. The simple fact that nearly all of his works are built from wide lines that are themselves built from thin lines is essential to his subversion of the age-old idea that lines are singular things, that drawing is a unified practice, and that together the two provide direct access to the artist’s touch, sensibility, self, and soul. Usle’s lines work at cross purposes to do a whole lot more than divide, define, and clarify. They complicate things in ways that make delectation absolutely necessary, neither frivolous nor inessential, simply the pleasurable point of it all.
For the last few centuries, that has been color’s job. And Uslé turns the tables on color in the same way that he upends assumptions about line. His colors start with the same everyday ordinariness of his lines. They are not flashy, outlandish, amped up, fussed over, highly dramatized, or loaded with special significance. Instead, they are fairly anonymous, as far from being unique, expressive, and revealing of psychological interiority as are the rudimentary, anyone-could-make-them marks that define Usle’s lines. His cool, matter-of-fact palette includes lots of blacks and whites, with loads of grays between them. The primaries – red, yellow, and blue – are present, as are the secondaries – orange, purple, and green. And that’s pretty much it. Almost no quirky tertiaries enter the picture. All of the subtleties of tone and tint in Usle’s physically resplendent paintings resides not in the identities of the colors he uses, but in what he does with them. The juice is in the translucence – in the shifts of saturation and impact, from faded, barely there traces of the slightest whiffs of pink to glowing, deliciously physical roses, breathless, budding reds and sumptuous, sweat-drenched burgundies; as well as from oddly tweaked turquoises that seem to be made of nothing but colored air to densely luscious azures, which have the presence of liquid light. Usle is a master of electrifying ethereality – not jolts of shocking energy and startling contrasts but warm, humming glows, supple buzzes, and gently undulating rhythms. Most important, his lines would not exist without color. In the same way that each of his lines is made up of smaller lines traveling across it, these self-referential or self-reflexive combinations of lines-made-of-lines are comprised of nothing but hovering, untouchable traces of color. Usle mixes his own paints, going out of his way to suspend powdery pigments in solutions that evaporate quickly, leaving their ethereal fingerprints delicately suspended just above the surfaces of his simply primed canvases. Not a single outline or contour drawing or silhouette interrupts any of his atmospheric paintings, which manage to marry crispness and ethereality – or precision and free-floating weightlessness – because of the ingenious ways they make line and color work in concert. Usle draws, not like a sculptor, in space, but like a painter, with space. That is why his small paintings seem so big, so uncrowded, expansive, and playfully open-ended, unencumbered by their literal dimensions. Made up of lines that divide nothing but themselves, and colors that turn the smallest spaces into worlds within worlds, each of Usle’s terrifically generous and humbly understated paintings gives viewers plenty of room to move freely – to not only see the world with fresh eyes, but to inhabit it with a fresh outlook, an enlivened mind, and a renewed interest in its seemingly simplest of details.
"Malatadas"
April 23 - June 11, 2009
Coloring in the lines
David Pagel
Strictly speaking, line and color are the two main ingredients in Juan Usle’s visually delicious paintings. Shape and texture contribute to the overall impact of his user-friendly images, but the roles these formal features play are secondary – entirely reliant upon what Usle does with line and color. And what he does with them turns a very long history of the impressive ways other painters have used these pictorial elements upside-down and inside-out. This leaves viewers free to see things differently, with fresh eyes, as it were, old habits and conventional restrictions having fallen away so that the world, once again, looks new, curious, and beautiful: an imaginatively engaging place where wisdom and mystery are not opposed, pleasure and analysis go hand-in-glove, and there’s always more to see – not because you missed it the first time, but because the visible world is so much richer and denser and more nuanced and fascinating than the comparatively rudimentary visual codes into which it must be translated before it can even be spoken of, much less written about.
Long before Usle managed to make line and color pirouette around each other like nobody’s business, in a dizzying dance that allowed each to promiscuously perform the other’s function (while it did its own resplendent thing, multitasking – or switch-hitting – with the best of them), these two formal elements were set at cross purposes. They were held not only far apart in terms of sensibility and impulse, but in philosophical, metaphysical, and bitter opposition. In late seventeenth-century France, a fierce battle emerged between line and color, between the followers of Poussin and the followers of Reubens.
On the one side was the priority of drawing. Its proponents insisted that line divided chaos from meaning, bringing order and clarity and sense out of emptiness or nothingness, in a positively Godly fashion. According to them, the artist’s touch provided the most intimate, direct, and immediate access to his mind, soul, creativity, genius, and originality, wherein the true beauty of existence resided. This belief still prevails today, with drawings commonly treated as the swiftest and straightest path to an artist’s ideas and intentions.
On the other side was color, which the supporters of linearity disparaged as cosmetic, superficial, inessential, feminine, emotional, and uncontrollable: suitable for second-rate citizens and second-class distractions but not really up to task of upholding the seriousness of real art, whose job it was to deliver deep knowledge and lasting insight. Although Reubens and his supporters did not buy into such cut-and-dried thinking or compartmentalized looking, the cultural values that dominated their day (and, until very recently, much of ours) disparaged their insistence that color was essential. Instead, color was treated as being little more than an incidental extra, better eliminated because it confused rather than clarified, seduced rather than satisfied, distracted rather than delivered.
This fundamental opposition between line and color recalled and played off of a similar controversy that emerged in Italy in the sixteenth century, when draftsmanship and linearity from such Tuscan artists as Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael were contrasted to and set against the work of such hedonistic colorists from Venice as Giorgione and Titian. And it has not gone away. It can be seen in the Impressionists’ efforts to make an art entirely out of visual sensation. It is visible in the Post-Impressionists’ swift return to thickly painted contours, gritty materiality, and over-wrought, often seething emotionalism, all of which fed and fueled Expressionism and its offshoot, Surrealism. Color pretty much disappeared from Cubism, which put a priority on cold calculation and cerebral analysis. And it did not play a big role in Dada or Conceptualism, Arte Povera or Nouveau Realisme. Color did manage to make something of a comeback in American Abstract Expressionism, formalist abstraction, and Color Field painting, but only as an antidote to the dominance of line, rationality, and intellect, all of which played a more dominant part of Minimalism, post-Minimalism, and much of Post-Modernism’s largely academic formats.
Usle’s paintings stand out against this backdrop because they treat line and color equally: as complicitous components whose sympathies and synergies are far more compelling than their differences, whose parallels and overlaps are infinitely more fascinating than their distinctions, and whose permeable borders and slippery similarities are part and parcel of an expansive whole that is so much greater than the sum of its parts that it becomes something boundless, infective, sublime, in its own idiosyncratic way: a shimmering instance of those exquisitely unexpected moments when everything simply falls into place – serendipitously, casually, and matter-of-factly, despite our own best intentions and through no fault of our own. When this happens, mundane, pedestrian reality suddenly shifts from numbing drudgery and plodding business-as-usual to something lovely, exciting, and alive – while remaining ordinary, common, and down-to-earth, not to mention unspecialized, unpretentious, and readily accessible. It’s a precarious balance that Usle strikes with offhand aplomb, infusing that certain je ne sais quoi we love in life into paintings so open-ended that there’s something for everyone in their simple compositions, quotidian colors, and humming, funky rhythms.
The first thing Usle does in his paintings is get his self out of the way. There’s nothing special about his lines. They are not expressive. They are not singular. They are not inimitable signatures that convey the uniqueness of his individual ego. Most important, they never pretend to deliver to viewers a privileged view of his interior life, the privatized, psychological make-up of the traumatized self that has been so much a part of modern art, ever since Romanticism prioritized subjectivity, Expressionism aligned the beleaguered individual with every meaning-laden gesture in his work, and abstraction generalized this deeply Freudian approach, interpreting each artistic mark as evidence of childhood conflict, adult anxiety, and the combustible combination of the two potentially incendiary elements. In contrast, Usle’s lines are cool, matter-of-fact, and uninflected by such high-flying dramaturgy, operatic bombastic, and melodramatic intrigue. None takes you back to the unique proclivities of his touch, fetishizing a singular, fingerprint-style of mark-making.
Time and again, Usle begins his little, endearingly intimate yet experientially big paintings by making marks that appear to be no more complicated, aestheticized, or loaded with meaning than the tally-marks prisoners make on the walls of their cells, in old, black-and-white movies, as they count off their days of confinement, patiently waiting for something dramatic – and transformative – to happen. On first glance, such paintings as Nilo Negro, El Fondo de tus Ojos, Cerca de los Geisers, Again the Cubas, and Mambru seem to consist of row upon row of short, vertical marks – all handmade and thus distinct from one another, yet far less important for their differences than for their overall, accumulative impact: the sense that they record slowly built-up accretions of time, the day-in and day-out regularity of the same thing done again and again, as weeks become months, months become years, and years turn into a lifetime – which suddenly seems fleeting. But to look carefully at these paintings is to see that Usle’s tally-like marks have not been made singularly. More important, they do not even record the vertical, top-to-bottom movement of a marking tool (pen, pencil, or brush) in the artist’s hand. Each row of approximately eight-centimeter-long marks was made with a squeegee pulling a load of liquid paint horizontally across the canvas, sometimes swiftly, sometimes slowly, yet always with varying amounts of pressure, resulting in the jittery, quivery interruptions that divide this line into smaller lines, each of which runs across its width. To be clear, Usle paints wide, horizontal lines that consist of sequences of short vertical lines. The compositional bedrock of his paintings is a series of vertically striated horizontal bands, each comprised of gently gradated tints of subtly modulated colors that fade from dark to light or intensify in saturation, from light to dark. El Principio and Rubicon are essentially no different, their main distinguishing features being that the wide bands are oriented vertically, in the first, and circularly, like nesting arcs, in the second.
Usle’s striated bands generate multi-directional movements. To follow one requires that your eyes move both horizontally – in long, smooth sweeps – and vertically – in swift, up-and-down zips. It isn’t difficult to do both simultaneously. But it is out of the ordinary, an emblematic instance of bodily capacities or physical talents the mind is not accustomed to – or not accustomed to acknowledging – especially when it is more commonly used to filter out and simplify, in the interest of making a little space for itself in the overwhelming onslaught of visual stimulation that is the image glut of modern life. No stranger to the crazy pace of modern life, Usle makes paintings that do not shy away from its incessant visual barrage. Instead, his softly sizzling works sensitize our eyes and minds to the subtleties of visual stimulation, generously inviting us to delight in the perceptual nuances that are possible when acute attentiveness is brought to the seemingly simplest of things.
Such complex, criss-crossing movements figure prominently in his large paintings, Espía de Palabras and Perdida en Bogota, forming, in the first, a solid base of bright orange, atop of which sits a fractured expanse of unraveling strands, staccato rhythms, dissonant diagonals, and broken spaces, and, in the second, a light to dark compression of earthy, ethereal browns that forms the ground for meandering, red and white doodles, several stray fragments, and a window-like opening onto deep space.
Usle’s paintings in which these striated bands do not dominate deploy a host of other mediated moves that put similar, unbridgeable distance between the artist’s self-signifying touch and the optical movements the lines generate. Three of the smallest, Repliegue (Día), Repliegue (Noche), and Sinuoso, resemble photographic close-ups or magnified enlargements of the striated lines that figure so prominently in Usle’s oeuvre. In all three, the shifts or kinks are exaggerated or zoomed in on so that each has the architectural solidity and illusionistic impact of a three-dimensional form, its heft and volume, or warp and woof, a force to be reckoned with. At twice their size, Las Navajas and Bonjour Monsieur Nemo translate the fragmented, cut-and-paste physicality of classic, pre-digital collage to abstract painting, treating spindly tendrils of color as if they had more in common with bits of trimmed paper than taped-off painterly applications, and positioning painterly passages as if they overlapped one another, like parts of pages glued over one another. In the show’s largest work, La Novia de Belchite and its freewheeling partner, the horizontal El Gran Patinador, Usle loosens lines and lets them run every which way. The big red painting is a sort of post-digital meditation on dissolution and directionlessness, its melting grid recalling tautness and order only to suggest that such structure and consistency are inadequate to the task of capturing the complexity of the virtual world’s whiplash movements – not to mention the glitches in the transmitted info, which interrupt the fluidity of the painting’s surface like rips in reality’s fabric or tokens of those unforgettable things that don’t fit into the pre-planned program. The big horizontal painting on an opaque white ground that does not quite hide what it covers is an instructive essay on the various ways Usle deploys line. It’s a concise, encyclopedic guide to every type of line in all the other paintings, each laid out in its own space to reveal its slippery, multi-directional movements, squiggly energy, quiet dynamism, and cool heat.
Suffice it to say that in Usle’s hands the practice of drawing is not what it used to be. The simple fact that nearly all of his works are built from wide lines that are themselves built from thin lines is essential to his subversion of the age-old idea that lines are singular things, that drawing is a unified practice, and that together the two provide direct access to the artist’s touch, sensibility, self, and soul. Usle’s lines work at cross purposes to do a whole lot more than divide, define, and clarify. They complicate things in ways that make delectation absolutely necessary, neither frivolous nor inessential, simply the pleasurable point of it all.
For the last few centuries, that has been color’s job. And Uslé turns the tables on color in the same way that he upends assumptions about line. His colors start with the same everyday ordinariness of his lines. They are not flashy, outlandish, amped up, fussed over, highly dramatized, or loaded with special significance. Instead, they are fairly anonymous, as far from being unique, expressive, and revealing of psychological interiority as are the rudimentary, anyone-could-make-them marks that define Usle’s lines. His cool, matter-of-fact palette includes lots of blacks and whites, with loads of grays between them. The primaries – red, yellow, and blue – are present, as are the secondaries – orange, purple, and green. And that’s pretty much it. Almost no quirky tertiaries enter the picture. All of the subtleties of tone and tint in Usle’s physically resplendent paintings resides not in the identities of the colors he uses, but in what he does with them. The juice is in the translucence – in the shifts of saturation and impact, from faded, barely there traces of the slightest whiffs of pink to glowing, deliciously physical roses, breathless, budding reds and sumptuous, sweat-drenched burgundies; as well as from oddly tweaked turquoises that seem to be made of nothing but colored air to densely luscious azures, which have the presence of liquid light. Usle is a master of electrifying ethereality – not jolts of shocking energy and startling contrasts but warm, humming glows, supple buzzes, and gently undulating rhythms. Most important, his lines would not exist without color. In the same way that each of his lines is made up of smaller lines traveling across it, these self-referential or self-reflexive combinations of lines-made-of-lines are comprised of nothing but hovering, untouchable traces of color. Usle mixes his own paints, going out of his way to suspend powdery pigments in solutions that evaporate quickly, leaving their ethereal fingerprints delicately suspended just above the surfaces of his simply primed canvases. Not a single outline or contour drawing or silhouette interrupts any of his atmospheric paintings, which manage to marry crispness and ethereality – or precision and free-floating weightlessness – because of the ingenious ways they make line and color work in concert. Usle draws, not like a sculptor, in space, but like a painter, with space. That is why his small paintings seem so big, so uncrowded, expansive, and playfully open-ended, unencumbered by their literal dimensions. Made up of lines that divide nothing but themselves, and colors that turn the smallest spaces into worlds within worlds, each of Usle’s terrifically generous and humbly understated paintings gives viewers plenty of room to move freely – to not only see the world with fresh eyes, but to inhabit it with a fresh outlook, an enlivened mind, and a renewed interest in its seemingly simplest of details.