Brett Goodroad & Juan Uslé

Juan Uslé’s early work is closely tied to nature and lived experiences, establishing a relationship between memory and perception. His works bring together personal memories and perceptions of a landscape in a state of metamorphosis with those derived from the pictorial process itself. It is a process that is, to a certain extent, expressionist, yet one that adopts a critical awareness to make something complex visible. The two works "Untitled", 1987, in this exhibition are memories of the Cubas River; they were painted during his early days in New York, while in "The Book of Landscape", 1988, he moves away from the memory of the familiar landscape, opens up, and redefines himself through what would later become his "Sueños del Capitán Nemo" period.

Brett Goodroad has a very direct relationship with the landscape and nature because he paints outdoors, in the open air, allowing him, through this objective element, to experiment with a sense of openness and isolation simultaneously. He evokes the reality of the landscape and nature surrounding him, in relation to the pictorial and perceptual process, as he himself says: “In my practice as a painter, what eludes you is precisely what you seek. It is that which you will never attain, and when you finally do, something beautiful and magical happens.” It is not merely an expressionist process in which forms are reinterpreted and evolve into forms rooted in reality. Brett Goodroad’s work is a symbiosis between figuration and abstraction, challenging an order, escaping it, and exercising the will to make decisions that transform his own source of inspiration, contradicting himself.

Both artists pursue alternative realities to existing forms in the search for what escapes or hides from perception, through a pictorial process, an invitation to observe and simply be.