“Everything Must Go” is one of Batlle’s signature layered compositions from “The Stationery Series,” where he blows up an iconic restaurant’s stationery or menu — examples include St. John, Momofuku, The Odeon, and The Spotted Pig (all at which Batlle has eaten)— then doodles or paints on them with watercolors, oil sticks, wine, coffee, and even squid ink.
And in the spirit of a true epicurean adventure, Batlle revealed exclusively to us that behind each of those paintings resides a recipe, and buyers of the paintings will be, let’s just say, in for a treat!
About the artist
Through his poignant and witty paintings, drawings, sculptures, and performances, Jay Batlle explores “the good life”—success, fortune, and an abundance of sensual pleasures—and the gulf that exists between this idealized life and the reality of our own. As he explains: “Even if it’s idealistic, or romantic, my work needs a pathos … an urgency, a problem.” For Batlle, this source is humanity’s futile aspirations to a life that we ultimately cannot attain, which he expresses in his work through recurrent images of women, elegant soirees, luxury brands, booze, food, and money. In his ongoing “The Stationery Series,” for example, he enlarges pieces of stationery from luxury hotels and restaurants and fills them with humorous, doodle-like images of limply sexualized cocktail glasses, thoroughbred dogs, bubble baths, and naked women.
Batlle’s work has been exhibited at galleries and museums around the world, including Nyehaus, Metro Pictures, Paul Kasmin gallery, the Chelsea Museum, Exit Art, The Dorsky Gallery in New York, the Ausstellungshalle Zeitgenössische Kunst in Münster, The Abteiberg Museum in Mönchengladbach, Germany, the National Museum of Fine Arts, Santiago de Chile, and at the Museum of Liverpool, United Kingdom and recently at Roza Azora gallery, Moscow. Batlle is currently invited as artist in residence at Mana Contemporary, Jersey City