Artist: Vicky Uslé
Exhibition title: Light and Passage
Venue: Espai Tactel, Valencia, Spain
Date: December 22, 2020 – March 12, 2021
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Espai Tactel, Valencia
A note on Vicky Uslé’s artworks for the exhibition “Light and Passage”:
How can a woman paint in the garden?
Vicky Uslé (Santander, 1981) dares to look into the garden and claim it for herself. Innocence may be one of the motors of artistic production but it is far from being ingenious. The author not only recognized the depth of the history of art, but also knows that her analysis of the garden in painting questions the very notions that we have about it and the space as an environment, the fragmentation and the breaking up of surfaces, even in the choice of materials, a fiction of inheritors, not forgetting that representation (“capacity of vividly presenting a theme”) is the article of reality of art or, in the words of Cocteau, it is “a lie which always tells the truth”.
The pieces by Vicky Uslé invite us to ask ourselves which part of the garden we are looking at, we focus on a detail or a plant, or even an emotion that this garden transmits to us. The contemplations isn’t ingenious, our brain constructs it with its visual charge, but also with the weight of culture of our social learning and the information that the rest of our body lends to the experience. Our neutral knowledge interweaved in the architecture of the pace itself where the pieces a displayed.
Vicky Uslé’s work is constructed around an us in this ambiguous garden, in which geometry itself, evoking the limit is diluted and contaminated. We are living on a planet where animal life only makes up 0.3% compared to the vegetable, thus speaking of the garden of its history and implications, of it’s relation to women and the hegemonic domination of man over nature, means rethinking who lives where. The only thing that is left to us is to allow our bodies to keep on learning and that our consciousness allows us to identify the moments in which tiny fragment of life exist.
Eduardo García Nieto. Independent curator.
COMPLEMENTARY NOTES:
ABOUT ESPAI TACTEL GALLERY
Since 2013 Espai Tactel program focuses on promoting contemporary and more audacious art in its different expressions and aspects, paying particularly attention to the latest trends.
The Gallery has exhibited the work of artists like Carles Congost, Michael Roy, Christto & Andrew, Natacha Lesueur, Momu & No Es or Carlos Sáez and a good number of artists always characterized by extreme risk in their aesthetic approaches and maxim plastic quality in their artistic results.
Espai Tactel intends to establish long-lasting relationships with the galleries represented artists, as well as with collaborating artists by supporting their careers and projects, connecting with other galleries and institutions, critics and curators, and by presenting them on fairs for contemporary art.
Exhibition video by Fito Conesa
Vicky Uslé, Light and Passage, 2020, exhibition view, Espai Tactel, Valencia, photo: Nacho López Ortiz
Vicky Uslé, Light and Passage, 2020, exhibition view, Espai Tactel, Valencia, photo: Nacho López Ortiz
Vicky Uslé, Light and Passage, 2020, exhibition view, Espai Tactel, Valencia, photo: Nacho López Ortiz
VICKY USLÉ, Fragmented, 2020, Pigment dispersion, watercolor and pastel on Arches paper 201,5 x153 cm, photo: Nacho López Ortiz
Vicky Uslé, Light and Passage, 2020, exhibition view, Espai Tactel, Valencia, photo: Nacho López Ortiz
Vicky Uslé, Light and Passage, 2020, exhibition view, Espai Tactel, Valencia, photo: Nacho López Ortiz
Vicky Uslé, Light and Passage, 2020, exhibition view, Espai Tactel, Valencia, photo: Nacho López Ortiz
Vicky Uslé, Light and Passage, 2020, exhibition view, Espai Tactel, Valencia, photo: Nacho López Ortiz
Vicky Uslé, Light and Passage, 2020, exhibition view, Espai Tactel, Valencia, photo: Nacho López Ortiz
VICKY USLÉ, Pond, 2020, Pigment dispersion, watercolor and pastel on Arches paper, 201,5 x153 cm, photo: Nacho López Ortiz
Vicky Uslé, Light and Passage, 2020, exhibition view, Espai Tactel, Valencia, photo: Nacho López Ortiz
VICKY USLÉ, Curtida, 2010, Photo Rag on 188g / m2 Hahnemühle paper – 100% cotton, 76 x 57 cm, photo: Nacho López Ortiz
VICKY USLÉ, Mimosa, 2020, Pigment dispersion, watercolor and pastel on Arches paper, 201,5 x153 cm, photo: Nacho López Ortiz
VICKY USLÉ, Fragmented, 2020, Pigment dispersion, watercolor and pastel on Arches paper 201,5 x153 cm, photo: Nacho López Ortiz
VICKY USLÉ, Neveros, 2010, Photo Rag on 188g / m2 Hahnemühle paper – 100% cotton, 57 x 76 cm, photo: Nacho López Ortiz