Sculpture Magazine

Nota publicada en la Sculpture Magazine, September 2010. Por Maria Carolina Baulo

Juan Batalla-An artist of the real and the trascendental worlds
http://www.sculpture.org/documents/scmag10/sep_10/sep10.shtml



The argentine artist Juan Batalla, has a peculiar work which connects art with the sacred; transforms his creations into icons which carry within the philosophy of the ancestral divinities of afro-Latin origin (orixás) as well as the personal history of the artist, specially in relation to his practice of bodybuilding. And it is important to highlight that both practices are disqualified as not honorable by the high culture; this complicates the way in which people approach to these “meta-cultures” when they are not related with the experiences they propose.

Batalla presents a mysterious world which participates of our reality and also interacts with a transcendental level; a dialectic communication where the circuit thesis -antithesis- synthesis closes in the art work. Works that combine certain aesthetic codes with the perception of a body –his own- which permanently changes. Experimentation emerges from that original nucleus where the abstraction of the spiritual and the figuration of the presence of corporeity combine. In almost every stage along his activity as an artist, his interest for abstraction and tridimensional structures prevailed: the inherent power of volumes and its magnificence, generate some sort of tension between the dense and the ethereal:”The plenitude that I felt by changing my body radically and developing physical strength to be able to participate in bodybuilding tournaments, were experiences I relate with the same passion I dig in every morning when I work in my workshop with the hammer in my hand”.

In his latest works, Batalla uses rubber from bicycle tires. Some ideas crucial: transportation, rolling, the movement of existence itself, the transit and passage between diverse worlds and states of conscious. Used tires act as memorials; they keep records, the track of time and the personal imprint, unique and irreplaceable. The tire´s tram, of textile appearance, preserve from a silent inner place, whatever is not visible in the images. Having experimented with rubber through geometry and constructivism and always with a tendency to the round circular forms which nurture one another as the cycles of life, his recent art works develop the combination of the opposite and the complementary: there is a hidden tension between the pieces hanging on the walls - connected as an organic framework - and those sculptures that appear to us with no recognizable forms. Bestiality and sensuality also play an important role when drawings and photography participate introducing the presence of a muscular body interacting with the rubber. Once more, the association body-ritual practice emerges clearly: the orixás are divinities free of prejudice, they embrace the erotic, humor and irony, against every rigid moral and religious concept that the occidental culture consolidated.

In 2001, Juan Batalla develops his craft as an artist, with huge public exposure. Since then, he participates in more than 20 individual and group exhibitions in diverse cities from Argentina and Uruguay and also international fairs such as ArteBA and ArtBO (Argentina and Colombia respectively). He also curated the exhibition “Owners of the Crossroad" at the Blanes Museum in Montevideo, Uruguay and at the Rojas Cultural Center in Buenos Aires, (2008-9). He is the co-Artistic and Editorial Director of the books “Owners of the Crossroad" (2007) and “"San La Muerte, a strange voice" (2004), and also received some international awards as the "Atabaque" Award, I.F.A., Uruguay (2002), among other activities. Therefore, his visual works are deeply related with those editorial projects he made together with the argentine plastic artist Dany Barreto, co-director of the Arte Brujo Collection, an investigation of several years which presents the combination of the interdisciplinary as a perfect combination of philosophy, anthropology, sociology and religion together with the contemporary art. As a specialist in the study of African artistic expressions, Juan Batalla’s works are influenced by Robert Farris Thompson, African-American Art Professor (University of Yale), curator and writer of several essays about Basquiat, Haring, Kuitca, among others.

These sculptures – some of which participated of his latest individual exhibition at the Recoleta Cultural Center in Buenos Aires, April 2010- explore the connection between primitive forms. Illumination becomes fundamental within this process; the volcanic sculptures made of wood covered by rubber, with a cover which hides in the inside an engine that activates the ascendant – descendent movement of those covers. All of his works influence one another; phallic forms appear with enormous intensity and refer to a masculine world. And even when black is the predominant color of the tires, rubber`s texture allows some sculptures painted in red, to become so realistic as flesh itself. That “alive” and organic effect generates empathy in the spectator and in the artist; nevertheless, the usage of robotic mechanisms produce the contrary effect, creating a definitive separation between the artist and his work.

Sculpture represents for Juan Batalla “a state of mind, a vibrating frequency from where I read reality and translate it into images”. His creations participate of the present times demands -with permanent need of the immediate - and also contemplates ancestral concepts, avoiding contemporary assumptions which sometime deny a philosophical reflection of the primitive, the essential and the nuclear. The special attention paid to lightness and weightiness relates with the works of Jose Bedia and Cornelia Parker, masters in pushing this resource to the limit. Batalla is an artist with a solid intellectual ground and dares to submit to new points of view his entire work, even when the sources of inspiration changed and there is no longer a clear identification with the influences of the past. He makes no vague interpretations or questions his choices, he lets his works go with the flow and trusts time will place them where they belong: “I see artists afraid of their own creations because they can´t make them fit into their own conceptual presumptions. Personally, I choose to set them free. It is better if they run before me”.