Juan Batlle Planas (Torroella de Montgr\u00ed, 1911-Buenos Aires, 1966) was a key figure of the Argentine avant-garde of the 1930s, but unknown in our country. He never became an Argentine national and, although he lived in Buenos Aires from the age of two, he never returned, not even on a trip, to Spain. <\/p>\n\n
Juan Batlle Planas: The Surrealist Cabinet<\/em> is the first monographic exhibition of this artist that will be seen in our country. The exhibition is not strictly a retrospective that covers the entire work of the artist, but rather an anthological exhibition that focuses on some periods, a type of work and a few themes, which do not include what made Batlle Planas a popular artist in Argentina: the so-called Noicas<\/em> , dreamy female figures, among muses, angels and dolls that guide the artist. <\/p>\n\n A deep expert in psychoanalysis, Batlle Planas considered graphic automatism a creative strategy with which to delve into the human soul. The theory of the unconscious and the internal processes of psychic energy are reflected in the different plastic manifestations of his prolific production. Salvador Dal\u00ed, Jos\u00e9 Guti\u00e9rrez Solana, Joan Mir\u00f3, Pablo Picasso, Giorgio de Chirico, Francis Picabia and Max Ernst were the referents of an iconographic universe that evolved from surrealist postulates to metaphysical painting or the language of abstraction, without forgetting the sculptural practice, participation in public projects and work as a writer. <\/p>\n\n Batlle Planas produced small-format works, mixing geometric and figurative forms with cutting and painting, with a strong oneiric component. A self-taught artist, he began by making copies of nature, but the dissatisfaction with these experiments led him towards the method of automatic creation, a key element in understanding his work process, which can be explicitly seen in the two productions that constitute the corpus of this exhibition: the so-called paranoid radiographs<\/em> and an extensive and careful selection of collages<\/em> , in both cases pioneering manifestations of surrealism in Argentina. <\/p>\n\n In the paranoid radiographs<\/em> the protagonists are skulls and skeletons, naked and empty silhouettes, mysterious beings of the subconscious that remind us of the artist’s interest in the so-called “Black Spain” of Francisco de Goya and Jos\u00e9 Guti\u00e9rrez Solana or in the Dance of Death<\/em> by Verges (in his homeland, the Empord\u00e0). In the collages<\/em> he creates visual poems in which he unites composition and content. His productions also have an added interest due to the fact that they emerged in the decade in which there was a notable arrival in Argentina of Spanish writers, publishers and intellectuals as a result of the Spanish Civil War. Batlle Planas knew a good part of this large group, and from the friendship he established with many of them fruitful collaborations were born, especially in the field of literary illustration, also included in the exhibition. <\/p>\n\n The exhibition presented at the Girona Art Museum, inaugurated at the Museo de Arte Abstracto Espa\u00f1ol in Cuenca and which will later travel to the Juan March Foundation Museum in Palma, offers a selection of almost fifty works, in addition to varied documentation that includes studies, magazines, books and illustrated notebooks, photographs, letters, etc. of Batlle Planas, artist, poet, illustrator, collector and, above all, the creator of worlds full of dreams and realities parallel to everyday ones.<\/p>\n\n Juan March Foundation \/ Girona Art Museum, 2018-2019<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":40565,"template":"","estat-exposicions":[335],"class_list":["post-43569","exposicions","type-exposicions","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","estat-exposicions-past-exhibitions"],"yoast_head":"\n