Michel BATLLE Portrait du Facteur Cheval

Michel BATLLE 1946

Michel Batlle was born in 1946 in Toulouse. His early work was inspired by the Ecole de Paris and American abstract painting. He later moved closer to what would become the Figuration Libre. In 1966, he created “psychophysiography”, a relationship between the body and the mind translated by all graphic means. He was also the first artist to make engravings on X-rays. Between 1965 and 1973, he was the founder of the “Cratère”, a place of musical, poetic and artistic avant-garde experiments in Toulouse, before creating the review Axe Sud which allowed the discovery of new figurations and English sculpture in 1981. From 1971 to 1975, he practiced performance painting and land art as critical parodies of the new international art market. The end of the century saw him return to the single subject of the face and body. Since 2010 he has been creating monumental metal sculptures. His work, borrowing from deep signs of cultural memories such as the Romanesque, the Gothic, Lascaux and perspective, is a protest work. The various figures come together and clash, the signs contradict each other, and for him, from these oppositions a tension between savage and civilised is born. Man, in his tragedies and downfalls, is at the centre of his reflection.

It was at the age of seventeen that he exhibited for the first time in 1963. Subsequently, he exhibited in numerous European galleries and museums. In 2001 he presented his work at the Franco-Japanese Institute of Kyushu, in Fukuoka (Japan). Fascinated by Prehistory, he presented his work in the cave of Bédeilhac during the exhibition 33 questions on art in 2000. More recently, the retrospective Michel Batlle, artiste en plein vent exhibited his works at the Château de LaRéole in 2018. His works are kept in several institutions, notably the Musée des Augustins in Toulouse, the FRAC Midi-Pyrénées, the FNAC, but also in Belgrade (Serbia), Kiev (Ukraine), Oklahoma (USA) and Sarajevo (Bosnia-Herzegovina). In 2016, he was one of the artists invited by Ben in the exhibition “Les Egos Etranges” at the Château de Hauterives.