This painting is a good example of the refined technique – minutely detailed watercolour and drawing – which Batarda found to be the most apt vehicle for his critique of the state of the arts.  The various verbal inscriptions, operating at the level of painting, weave a web of complex meanings, an intricate filigree of allusions both erudite and popular, while also being clearly self referential. As in a strategic map, or one used to find ‘a treasure’ (art), with its allusions of an aged surface in the ragged cut-out edges, we find here an amalgamation of cartographic pseudo-signs, seamed together in a patchwork of anthropomorphic fragments, operating as a caricature of process painting or of the French group Supports/Surfaces. In its cumulative aspect, in the title, in the programmatic reproduction of webs and brush marks drawn from gestural painting, in some of the inscriptions, the work parodies Abstract Expressionism. Accompanying the artist’s signature is a written clue pointing to ‘La Peinture qui coule’, an inscription that the artist had used in some of his watercolours of 1971-1972. Meaning not only ‘painting that drips’ but also ‘painting that sinks’, the recurrence of this phrase points to the constant presence of a critique of art in general, as well as of his own work, and reminds us that this painting is a kind of revisitation, Batarda’s commentary on his own painting as art critique. 

MPS

May 2010