Juan Usle: Works, Writings

The hypersensitivity Usle describes is a kind of visionary state, but it is one that is painful - and memorable precisely because it is painful. When we see certain paintings of Usle's that use bright, intense, searing colours, shouldn't we think of this early encounter with one of those states of being that suddenly and dramatically remove us from our everyday mode of perception - one of those events that teach us that everything we perceive might be perceived entirely differently, given even a small modification of the perceptual apparatus we normally take for granted? There are certain paintings by Usle, very complicated ones, that might well remind us of the experience of peering into a kaleidoscope, and while this is not to say that we are therefore to imagine that we should also find the sight of these paintings painful - far from it! no more than, not having suffered sunstroke, we would find looking through a kaleidoscope painful - it is helpful to be reminded that such experiences, in which there is a visual clamour beyond what we are used to being subject to, may not be easy or comfortable ones, and therefore they are only a step away, albeit a crucial step, from being painful. They are a little too much, and therefore they put pressure on our aesthetic expectations. This is Usle's pictorial equivalent of Rimbaud's famous "dereglement de tous les sens."