This openness and continuity filters through the works in the exhibition. Heaven adventure, for example, conjures an upward motion. A horizontal series of dark brown bars frame expanses of blue, like the rungs of a ladder, or the windows of a highrise building—towering up beyond the edge of the canvas, stretching ever taller. Perhaps we’re seeing the sky, or a reflection of it against transparent glass panes. Wavering someplace between natural landscape and urban architecture, the work offers a vague orientation—further underlined by a subtle yet incongruous strip that cuts between the image’s top and bottom sections like a horizon line. But even within the bands of metallic dark brown that constitute the painting’s bottom third, light blue shines through in small flashes between fissures, unsettling a prescribed relationship between earth and sky.

Here, the rows of brushstrokes are fluid, gently folding ribbons that glimmer like satin and flow like waves—undulating between flatness and depth. There’s an airiness to them, as though they never fully touch down on the surface, but only lightly graze it. With a translucent iridescence like crepe paper, it seems implausible that such a structure can remain intact.

It is in this sense of adventure that we find our way into Uslé’s paintings—to be immersed in the experience of them. Or, taking into account the liquid character of their medium: submerged. This perception is prompted by another work in dialogue with I, titled I. The rhythms and shades of the monochromatic blue painting reach another level of depth and expansiveness, conveying a particular sensitivity to fluctuations in light and motion. Its overlapping of rows, brushstrokes and blues produce a gridlike effect in places, similar to a woven textile—complete with wobbly edges, frays, folds and inconsistencies. Once again, there is an upward motion: darker, more dense blues flood the bottom half, giving way to paler shades, light and space near the top. There’s a sensation of drifting up from the water’s depths to its surface, or moving from night into day. Within this expanse, small points of light appear like lens flare, and brush marks become electrically illuminated. A clash of wave-like blues again forms a horizon of sorts, here buried in the painting’s bottom third.

Such horizontal movement is turned over in Tres veces más—in effect bringing moments of interference and unexpected shifts not only into individual works, but across the group of paintings as a whole. Here, the consecutive bands of brushstrokes that run vertically up and down the canvas come to resemble streets in aerial view or a cropping of skyscrapers. There are two prominent colors: deep teal and muted lavender. While bright segues into bold yellow, red and blue run under, trail off and break with the image’s more or less consistent vertical edges in a cluster of slender cables. Here, the work’s currents and waves become more electrically charged: both in the wiry strands of primary colors, as well as their glitchy presence. We can follow along similar lines into Ahí vivía yo, where parallel stripes of blue and red find stable ground at the painting’s center. And further still, into Oculto en la belleza, a striking canvas primarily consumed by reds that flicker like static noise.

Throughout, there’s a visible change in tempo that occurs, like fastforwarding, slowing down or rewinding a film. The pace and direction of Uslé’s marks and the resulting light that shimmers from them take on different effects, carrying distinct emphases and intonations: at times soft, curved and sprawling, at others more tightly sequenced and flattened out.

In accumulations of time, color, gestures and signs, the repetitional continuity of the works gives way to a richly layered fabric, a constellation of experiences and sensations. We can peer through the cracks and slippages, soak up the reflections that bounce off the surface, follow the threads that construct the whole—line by line, row by row. Like screens, they offer glimpses into another layer of reality, another place, which only unfolds as we navigate through. What Uslé guides us towards is something submerged, hidden—lying just behind, or just beyond, and continuing just out of view.

Text by Julianne Cordray

Root is a new installation by Willem de Rooij, developed especially for Galerie Thomas Schulte. Touching on notions of identity and nationalism, it juxtaposes a seventeenth-century painting on loan from the Stadtmuseum Berlin with thirty-four unique photographic responses made by De Rooij.

In the seventeenth century, the Dutch Republic housed many prolific painters who developed numerous specialized painting genres. Individual artists cross-appropriated each other’s formal and iconographical techniques, which led to a rich and complex visual culture. Because of their innovations, Dutch artists became sought after by wealthy patrons across Europe.

One of them, Willem Frederiksz van Royen (ca. 1645, Haarlem, NL–1723, Berlin), arrived in Berlin from the Dutch Republic in 1669 to become a court painter to Friederich Wilhelm, Elector of Brandenburg, and his successor, Friederich I. Van Royen later became one of the founders of the Akademie der Künste, and after, a director and a professor there. Inspired by artists such as Melchior d’Hondecoeter, he specialized in flower still lifes and menageries. These were decorative genres that were popular with the elites of the time, and Van Royen’s works both recorded and idealized their lifestyles.

Today, a number of Van Royen’s works are still located in Berlin at the state and city collections, though many were looted in the Second World War. In a small still life from 1712, Orangen, an einem Faden aufgehängt, now in the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg, a cluster of oranges is depicted hanging on a string. In the Dutch Republic, oranges at the time connoted royalism, a reference to the Dutch Royal Family, the House of Orange, and many painters used this motif to express their political convictions. Today, the color orange still signals support for the Dutch nation-state and its policies.

In the seventeenth century, Dutch farmers cultivated a great variety of orange-colored carrot types that became popular export products. There is no proof that the resulting ‘hype’ was linked to monarchism, but it is known that in 1758, anti-monarchists from The Hague forced local vegetable sellers to hide their orange carrots.

Perhaps Van Royen had the monarchy and his native country in mind when he found an anthropomorphic carrot at a Berlin market on July 18, 1699. On the back of the painting that he made of the carrot, Van Royen describes that it ‘was grown in a garden at St Jürgen’s Gate’. That means this work was thought of as a realistic depiction of an actual object—unusual for art of the time, though not for Van Royen; the above-mentioned oranges and a striking pair of small still lifes depicting tulips are equally naturalistic. Van Royen’s carrot still life is today part of the collection of Berlin’s Stadtmuseum and is registered there under the title Rübe.