Barcelona, Spain, 1952.
The painter's studio is like a small urban oasis. Different types of sand are found in large transparent boxes, waiting to be part of her paintings. Next to it, a repertoire of rope rolls awaits the same fate. Batllori is in love with texture, and both materials help her to give body to her works. With them she is working on her most recent project, the series Sorra, poesia i vida, inspired by the poem If, by Rudyard Kipling.
For more than a decade, Cristina Batllori has met daily with Kipling's verses. "I have read it hundreds of times, for me it is a reference to what a person should be in life", she reflects. She decided to take it as a leitmotif of her work because, as she explains, she likes to "give a thread" to her works, "that they have a meaning and coherence".
In the series, Kipling's words are written on the canvas. Together with them, the rope and the sand draw spirals that refer to different stages of personal development. "For me, the rope represents life, with it I draw circles, like a marked path, because in life freedom is only relative. The drawing of the strings allows me to evoke moments of greater or lesser solitude, more intense stages and others that are more restful," she says. The artist is a lover of softness of colour: "I almost never use strong colours", and in her paintings white, creams and, as a counterpoint, grey and black predominate. Few of her works are unique pieces. Most of them are structured in series of two or four paintings, which allow him to better develop the themes.
