Agelio Batle, “REsurrection Lesson”

by DeWitt Cheng

SFartsED Gallery, San Francisco, California

Exhibition continues through June 29, 2024

Agelio Batle, “Seated / Mirror,” 2024, graphite and acrylic on wood, 14 x 12”. All images courtesy of STatsED Gallery, San Francisco

Agelio Batle spent his childhood in Guam, absorbing that tropical island’s milieu. There were the jungle and rusted relics of the recent war, and the culture of the native Chamorro people, which combined with his family’s Philippine Catholicism. These influences toward the eclectic, idiosyncratic and personal religion of artmaking, one that many transcultural, transnational artists adopt. Batle placed his recumbent figure, a contemporary transi (a medieval carved skeleton tomb sculpture, a reminder of our transience) atop a vibrating bed sheeted with white mylar film. The oscillating skeleton would mark the mylar and gradually create a self-portrait. The graphite body would eventually vanish with use, to be replaced by self-generated likenesses, just as carbon-based life forms decay and metamorphose into, say, lead pencils, you and me.

Batle has used his mastery of cast graphite to create elegant, poetically charged sculptures of animal and plant life, including cast versions of his hand posed as if signing a touchscreen (a nod to M.C. Escher’s 1948 lithograph, “Drawing Hands”). There are shells, leaves, antlers, horses, dragonflies, rabbits, snakes, butterflies, and owls, each accompanied by brief summations of their symbolic uses in various cultures. The artist’s love of the natural world combines with his feeling for materials and materiality and a conceptual outlook that was inculcated working with ceramics in graduate school. His current approach has grown more sensuous and associative, less word-bound. Explains Batle, “The act of making marks lures ideas into the physical world. Hands perceive and reveal things that our eyes and conscious minds may never know … It's not the pencil that draws, but your hand.”

Agelio Batle, “USS Texas / Monster,” 2023, mirror in gold frame, 48 x 38”

“REsurrection Lesson” includes approximately thirty graphite wall pieces, most made during 2024, and extends his impressive NEA residency show at the same gallery last summer. The title may refer to Christ’s rising from the tomb, or, more broadly, to the idea that nothing is lost in nature, that the constituent elements of matter are recombined and changed into other forms, like the graphite laid down during the Carboniferous Period more than three hundred million years ago. All the pieces are in graphite on plywood substrates, with the smaller ones displayed within thin gold frames Others, larger and unframed, are set atop wall-mounted shelves, and most feature carved and punctured surfaces that serve as rich backgrounds to the painted or ‘drawn’ (with a router bit) imagery. The rich, burnished slaty surfaces are particularly handsome in contrast to the blobs of resin, powdered with gold dust, that seep out from the drilled apertures, suggesting sap extruded from trees, or, in a more mythological or religious vein, exudations from weeping wounds. The square-format tablets suggest icons or relics from some forgotten past, excavated and battered but obdurate, bearing their obscure messages and images in an invented cuneiform.

Agelio Batle, “Between Meteor Fields,” 2024, graphite on plywood, 60 x 42”

The mute, weathered artifacts display stoicism and perseverance without melodrama. They are mysterious and dignified, sometimes with an element of humor. The artist’s ideas derive not from words and theories but from working with materials with a what-if spirit of inquiry and experimentation. Batle remarked in an interview that carving is for him like drawing, and he works without preconceptions in complete freedom.

The themes of doubling, multiples, and mirrors appear throughout. In the five “Mirror” plaques, small pale silhouetted figures are reflected and reversed across vertical mirror edges or horizontal water-surface axes, and the oddly shaped frames. Conjoined trapezoids, instead of rectangles, suggest hinged rotating planes or folding screens. The twinning idea drives two of the larger pieces as well. “Between Meteor Fields,” with its solitary illuminated boatman at night that is mirrored in the dark water fading indiscernibly into the dark sky, are both framed within decagons hinged like oyster shells. “USS Texas/Monster” is a mirror made in the shape of the only battleship to have served in all of World War II’s amphibious landings. Doubled and rotated, it reads as a serviceable humanoid or robot; it is also a salute to the artist’s father, a Navy mechanic who during the 1950s tended the engines beneath various ships’ waterlines.

Agelio Batle, “Ruptured Frame 2,” 2023, gold frame, graphite, wood, 12 x 12”

Two “Ruptured Frame” assemblages from 2023 employ gold picture frame molding in an original and satisfying way. Batle decided on the irregular external shape of the pieces, and then meticulously cut and glued the interior elements, working in toward the center, segment by segment. The oddball shapes suggest San Francisco’s Victorian houses, with their bay windows and mitered corners. The ornamental patterns stamped into the molding stock and created by the artist’s saw-cut edges evoke a vanished era of gilt elegance. The pieces’ apertures (or mat windows) composed of darker wood suggest redwood-paneled rooms and stair steps down into pictorial depth.

Agelio Batle, “1565 Legazpi’s Spider Galleon,” 2024, graphite on plywood, 31 x 36”

While most of the drilled works are ahistorical, two of the larger ones evoke Philippine history. “1988 Dewey’s USS Olympia” presents the flagship of Commodore Dewey during the Spanish-American War (in which the United States took the Philippines from Spain) as a doubled and rotated silhouette of the cruiser, its outline delineated by drill-bit craters or bullet holes. It also resembles a bead-encrusted gown, albeit one accessorized with smokestacks and antennae. “1565 Legaspi’s Spider Galleon” alludes to the fleet commanded by Miguel López de Legaspi to seize control of the Philippines for Spain, inaugurating the “Manila galleon” trade in spices, porcelain, and slaves between Manila and Acapulco. In Batle’s version, the galleon is doubled and rotated, forming another triangular costume form, with the masts and rigging suggesting spider webs and fatal entanglements.

Related to the doubling/reflection idea is that of rotation, which results in multiple views of single figures. Examples include “Squatters, (with gold),” “Ate [sister] Sweeping,” and Self-Portrait Whirling (with gold),” and the isolated heads of grandfather or grandmother — “Lola’s Head (with gold),” “Lolo Speaking (with gold,” “Lolo’s Head (with gold”).

Agelio Batle, “Reversing Vapours,” 2024, graphite on plywood, 12 x 12”

More abstract are “Fertile Field (with gold)” and “Fertile Field 2 (with gold),” both without obvious subject matter but still compellingly mysterious: excavated earth, with gold nuggets, perhaps; and the four Vapour pieces, “Reversing Vapours,” “Seventeen Vapours,” “Eighteen Vapours,” and “Vapours Talking,” featuring oblong biomorphic forms resembling fungi, caption balloons or cartoon ghosts.

An earlier work, “Ash Dancer” (2016), was a tour de force of a human skeleton, with every bone made from cast graphite mixed with resin, and silicone strings serving as ligaments. Batle’s father had recently died, and the artist considered the dark, shiny sculpture to be a symbol of mortality and a surrogate for fathers, sons, and the march of generations. While it would be hard for Batle to top “Ash Dancer” for audacity and invention, the new carved graphite works open up new territory to this virtuosic and intrepid explorer, who is so adept at putting everyday materials at the service of the invisible.

DeWitt Cheng is an art writer/critic based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He has written for more than twenty years for regional and national publications, in print and online, He has written dozens of catalogue essays for artists, galleries and museums, and is the author of “Inside Out: The Paintings of William Harsh.” In addition, he served as the curator at Stanford Art Spaces from 2013 to 2016, and later Peninsula Museum of Art, from 2017 to 2020.