Michel Batlle for the Jiu Xian Garden Village project in China
"The different peoples that make up China are referred to as "minorities." This is the title of my painting created in JiuXian. It follows my series from the early 1980s titled "The Cultural Wars.""
Michel Batlle
Sculpture Artist
"The Succession of Shadows"
From one shadow to another,
Surpassing the shadow, falling back into it,
In successive existences, one after the other, starting over.
And these shadows that pursue each other, merging into darkness.
From their overlaps, night is born.
The river nourishes the mountain.
It rises, stretched by light,
Pushing its mineral entrails,
Rocks adorned with green wool,
Permanent green. Toward the sky.
Protrusions born from telluric chaos,
A massive velvet jaw,
A bulging massif, with outlines cut off from any horizon.
Men have taken refuge there, nourished themselves, multiplied, fought…
Each of these mountains has its uses, its folds, its curves, its mysteries,
Its passages of air and stories.
Here, a woman and her buffalo in the water of the rice field,
There, a fisherman standing on his bamboo raft.
These mountains were gods, an army planted and forever petrified,
Ready for battle, vigilant, immobile on their territory.
Man is at peace there, cultivating his gardens with repeated gestures, his millennia-old tools penetrating the rich, soft earth.
He moves from one square of water to another of fruit trees, a familiar labyrinth,
From one house to another, from the road to the forest.
The bamboos, vertical, flexible, and resonant, clash and vibrate in singular rhythms, punctuating the life of the damp fields.
Everyone knows the secret life of this aquatic world…
The shadow is born from light, it is the other side of the solar clash,
It cuts, fragments, slips its presence,
Plants its backlights for a unanimous darkness,
Giving way to the Milky Way.
But the night is not a burning coal; other shadows arrive on soft feet, revealing other forms, the usual passages of this indistinct whole…
Observing the cycle of shadows and light, the painter waits patiently, leaning against the rock.
The ink waits for the brush, the paper moist and tender…
Hours pass…
A bird, suddenly, streaks across the strange panorama with its flight.
"Peoples or Minorities?"
The different peoples that make up China are referred to as “minorities.”
This is the title of my painting created in JiuXian.
It follows my series from the early 1980s titled “The Cultural Wars.”
Every day, languages and cultures die out. Dominant ideologies, political powers, and commercial interests have brought populations into line with consumerism. Everything has become a market, even art!
In this triptych, the contrasts between natural and manufactured forms serve as evocative elements of these issues inherent to the evolution of our modern civilization. Its visual language is that of 20th-century art—gestural abstract painting, geometric and material art, figuration, writings (here, Lao Tzu’s poems in palimpsests painted by three different people).
There is no anecdote, except for the outlines of the mountains, which indicate the place where the painting was created.
It is a historical painting without a story, leaving the viewer free to interpret it as they wish; I hope they will feel the human tragedy I intended to evoke.
about Michel Batlle
In 1966, Michel Batlle created a completely new concept that combines art with the body in a “relationship between the body and the mind, expressed through graphic means,” which he named *psychophysiography*. Unlike most avant-garde movements that typically emerge with new ideas, *psychophysiography* offers a surgical and intuitive reading of the world, with the human body as its central focus. This “science” of inaccuracy and anatomical simulacrum justifies its existence due to the distance that artists at the time had from the human body as a fundamental basis of artistic research, not only in its spirituality but also in its physiology. It is the materialization of a field of exploration and research into the relationships between the physical and the intellectual, the instinctive and the visible world, along with all their combined sensations.
