Vicente Zito Lema: You have called psychic automatism surrealism’s primary mechanism. What exactly is that instrument—what is its nature?—and what have you gotten from using it?
Juan Batlle Planas: We are—luckily or unluckily—still in the earliest infancy of this strange device that enables concentration through its own law and, through the automatic mechanism, deconcentration of strange and individual worlds.
How do we obtain automatism? How do we arrive at the words, phrases, images, compositions? Is it solely through frenzied madness or can it be through other articulations? How is that world detected?
I would like to begin with a brief overview of Batlle Planas’s life as an artist. Self-taught, he began making art—naturalist images —at the age of twenty. Dissatisfied with those experiences, he soon discovered the automatic method. He made his first drawings using that method in 1935. In 1936, he made radiografías paranoicas (Paranoid X-Rays), a series of works in tempera using black, yellow, and leaden gray.
