“…And, once again, we find ourselves viewers before Batlle Planas’s paintings, viewers who know that an artist sends a visual message straight to our sensibility, that he takes a non-rational path to make us understand. In his paintings, he speaks to us of angst and vague despair, of reveries, of inchoate aspirations, of ideal entities whose grandeur one could only hope to reach—and all of that in a language of colors never even imagined, of blues and grays so transparent they are only possible in the atmosphere of the dream. At other times, he lays before us vibrant and warm golden atmospheres that speak to us of the need to live, to overcome the desperation that envelops man. Or he shows us tortured lines that unmake faces with terrifying angst that take us back to childhood nightmares or the terrors of primitive races. The color is extraordinarily emotional; simple, in no way strident, it creates the right emotional atmosphere. The rendering is no less docile than the color to the artist’s desire for expression and, thus, it becomes stiff, direct, or schematic where angst, terror, or melancholy reigns. But it ripples to end up in tender swirls or to vanish in chiaroscuros when warmth and exaltation prevail. Finally, a grand synthesis of polar abstract and surreal elements seems to culminate in the artist thanks to his use of a guide-point technique. The painter attempts to work through his loneliness by bringing into the human figure the elements that organize the cosmos, that is, by fusing as one human-intuitive automatic elements, on the one hand, and the principles of a universally valid suprahuman mathematics, on the other.”

Pellegrini, Aldo -Adolfo Este- (1947)
“Juan Batlle Planas’s Visual Message”, Cabalgata magazine, Nº 20, Buenos Aires, pp. 1-8-9-16.