The Brooklyn Rail

Upon entering Lelong’s Chelsea gallery, two possibilities immediately present themselves. A visitor may either enter a smaller gallery space, the walls painted a dark blue, or continue through a likewise blue-painted passage past a large painting, Soñé que revelabas (Snake) [I Dreamt That You Revealed] (2024–25), to the main gallery space, whose walls are a more conventional white. The passage provides ample room to stand back from the large, predominantly blue painting that occupies it, facing the gallery desk. However, the inclination to walk up to this painting’s surface and move along in front of it is inescapable, encouraged by its architectural setting. In doing so the viewer enters the painting: at just over 120 inches in height and 89 inches in width, the work easily encompasses the viewer within its physical limits. And just as walking or visually scanning horizontally induces an awareness of temporal unfolding, so does the composition of the painting itself. A loaded brush has been moved incrementally in short strokes of inexact length from one side of the painting to the other—at different moments, the brush is held either perpendicular to this horizontal movement or at a diagonal, alternating first this way and then that. The marks are repeated again and again, each time adjacent to and parallel with the previous row, filling the painting gradually. Indeed, the title of this exhibition translates to English as “One hundred days of April,” alluding to the relativity of time experienced or recalled in memory, to its capacity to misalign with simple calendar chronology. In Uslé’s work, time expands and contracts exponentially.

This painting is one of a growing number of large-scale works by Uslé that are all named “Soñé que revelabas.” The artist’s preferred translation is “I dreamt that you revealed,” but it could also be “I dreamed that you appeared”—also interesting, as we are left to think about whether an object or a subject ultimately did the disclosing. To each painting in the series is also attached the name of one of the world’s rivers, in this case the Pacific Northwest’s Snake River. The space in many of the paintings on view in the main gallery recalls light passing through or across a substance, a membrane, or a refractive material; here water is the obvious reference. Uslé’s paintings all evoke various levels of illumination and transitions of color or brightness and darkness, like the effect of a cloud passing in front of the sun, its shadow cast on the ground or a wall, light seen through foliage or across the surface of a river or lake. As the art writer Kevin Power put it in an essay on Uslé’s work, “I tend to suspect that shapes always come from somewhere known, consciously or unconsciously, out of an image bank: perhaps they have to if they are to feel alive, existing beyond the given formulas of aesthetics.” Indeed, if one thinks of the vast reservoir of photographs that Uslé has accumulated over the years and sometimes exhibited, there are many images—recorded from day to day life, wherever he might be or whatever he might be doing—that are coincident with the compositions, colors, and forms of his paintings.

The blue walled room near the gallery entrance is occupied by small-scale paintings no more than 18 ⅛ inches in height. All are hung on a vertical orientation with horizontal bands and occasional painterly or linear elements that interrupt or articulate the format of the canvas. They are placed at intervals in a row, perfectly positioned, as are all the paintings throughout the exhibition, so as to provide room for a viewer to engage with them individually and also to see them in a sequence, highlighting their similarities and differences. The blue walls concentrate and recalibrate colors, increasing the radiance of yellows and reds and adjusting how we perceive contrasts of hue and tone. Of particular note is the painting that gives the exhibition its title, as it displays a regular rhythm of opaque blacks and transparent blues that is unlike the broken, irregular rhythms of other paintings.

The overall tone of the exhibition tends toward a luminous darkness exemplified here by a black painting titled Soñé que revelabas (Dvina-Vytchegda) (2024–25). In this work the black is not solid but ambiguous, like fading light at dusk or water shifting under the influence of currents or winds. The traces of being that we encounter in Uslé’s paintings are made all the more compelling by his ability to stage such tangible, yet fleeting transitions.