Born under the sun of Toulouse in 1946, Michel Batlle came into the world in an already atypical family context and grew up in an environment conducive to artistic daydreams. His father, Virgilio Batlle Vallmajo, an exile from the Spanish Civil War, arrived in France in 1939 with the exodus of La Retirada. An anarchist, he fought in the Columna Durruti of the Brigades Internationales. Virgilio dedicated part of his life to painting, while also working in a workshop building religious statues, as well as in a paper factory in Olot, Catalonia. As for his mother, Marcelle Daynès, a nurse at Montauban Hospital, she also maintained an artistic side, playing the organ in churches and making paintings and pyrographs. So, as a child, Michel Batlle was surrounded by sounds and images, thus providing the stirrings of an abundant imagination and an acute and sensitive flair for the direct observation of his surrounds, which would continue to enrich the multifaceted and obsessional direction of his artistic work, through snippets, echoes, and spectra.
