If, as we have recently seen, the Velázquez Prize was not intended for the political manufacture of a purely state art, a painter like Juan Osli had it long ago (and much before that, of course, Cristino de Vera, José María Ytorralde, or Aurelia Muñoz). The big exhibition This boat is on the mountaina summary of thirty years of painting, exquisitely curated by Ángel Calvo Ulloa, places before our eyes a guide that, it seems, wants in vain to explain to anyone who does not understand it. In itself it was not enough, the rat Charla with his Uslé reveals unmistakable signs: his reading of Velsquez, a lone bird or his taste in the painting of Ortega Muñoz (and the painting of Mark Rothko or Sigmar Polke, of course) did not confirm the certainty of finding us before the other art, the real art.
After the middle of the ushanta, the deleted painting begins to oversimplify itself. We were then shown dense, dark blankets, most of them laden with material. ElorioViggo Carguero who was swallowed by the edge of the sea at the foot of the Cantabrian coast was next to the one who lived when he was a child, always going with him. But I couldn’t tell if it was actually a memory: the boat, the night, the silhouettes of helpless animals on the edge of the cliffs, the roar of the storm, passing across the flat surface of newspaper photographs. This kind of transformation of memory into graphic forms was always a complication of his visions. The small floor space he shared with Vicky Severa when he studied in Valencia required compatibility as a bedroom and a photography laboratory – bomb red, walls painted black. It will be the ultimate photography Lenya Dolka (2008-2018) the main character that gives him a haunting of street images that are painfully similar to his own paintings (on the other hand).
These paintings were quickly organized into something that wasn’t exactly a series (the commissioner and artist called them “families”): Nemo, Nemaste, in Urbania, Río Copas…And then, until we come to Soñé who reveals, titled A Memory of That Episode and extending from 1997, that today it contains some of his most distinctive paintings: the horizontal stripes, the light paint that slides with the stroke of pulses, the large shapes, the monotony, the brilliance of aluminum and graphite. But Owsley’s creative economy also has another patron.
Since the first Madrid exhibition in Montenegro, his work has proposed a diary in which personal experiences – transcendent or trivial, but always tangible – are recorded in various forms that, ideally, have no end, such as those of music, although their elements are, in reality, few, as in the alphabet. Start first with the boat and the mountain. For Luigo, the paintings’ radical move to New York had an immediate resonance, and the boat and the mountain remained for a while. Then the painter, who contemplated the storm and the disaster, was forced to immerse himself in the reality of a new surrounding that did not allow him to contemplate, and in which he only heard its barking, like a trumpet in his bag. However, the paintings lost weight and the material became liquid.
I saw the opening at the peak of the city that never sleeps. The overlapping image will be next Broadway Boogie Woogieby the neo-European Mondrian. Certainly, the network in which Rosalind Krauss wanted to see an emblem of avant-garde purity leads Owsley to very different outlets, indeed options. On the one hand, there appeared works that were extraordinarily heterogeneous, without a family, as if by different painters – the enormous collection of paintings. Single people-On the other hand, the seaweeds, grids and circles also resemble those of other artists, such as Gordillo or Jonathan Lasker.
In New York, he emerges into a new reality that does not allow him to contemplate. Just listen to your barking
Back then, Uslé was Uslé. It featured prominently in documents (in particular, IX, of 1992), the best museums were devoted to great exhibitions, and the luster of prestige was immeasurable. But the end of the 1990s was an uncertain time. When he emerged from the depths, the world he found before him was completely contrary to his origins, because he had decided with Ignacio Castro (Anthrophobia(2024), “the perfect temple of fluidity and commercial nothingness,” what Byung-chul Han called the “profound boredom” of a reality in which the material experience of body, land, water—and painting—has been detracted from by technological fluidity, without obstacles, of the same and the fluid. Above the slow brown river, the painter saw a time echoing without “earthly connections.” But nothing can sell the collection if we are not, precisely, in front of one of the best illustrators we can find. That’s it, someone to help that this is rooted in the physical sensitivity of drawing and life is irreversible.
Not if it was Ross Bleckner (Agnes Martin Contest) who languidly observed that abstract purity could be the earthquake and heat of the referential forms: the beach, the bodies, the despinaderos, the river between the branes. We were born into a largely analog world (if that’s not repetitive); They are thin, irregular, blotchy and abrupt, and are marked by skin and senses by bark and wood. Well, though all that had to be obliterated – by sheer survival – was on the other shore of the ocean, it was never the painting that embodied it. amnesia It bears the title of the main work from 1992 and appears alongside a few other works.
Yet it is precisely, between the horizontal bands that conjure this world that is uninterruptedly animated by wire flows, that the painter – quite the painter – – well as he visits – offers us the groove of a slight slice of the brush, the human color that becomes transparent beneath the surface. There are few accidents that lead to life, the testimony of an art that resists.
“Juan Owsley.” This boat is on the mountain. Reina Sofía Museum, Madrid. Until April 20, 2026.