Gil Batle: Double Life presents painted plates that carry Batle's singular chronicle of incarceration and survival into a new register — flat, frontal, and deceptively domestic. Prompted by a chance encounter with a Blue Willow porcelain dish whose monk and fish suddenly suggested a prison shank, Batle began painting in blue acrylic on found white plates. Island animals, dense foliage, and coastal settings mingle with blades, cages, and emblems from his past — a cuttlefish coiling around a blade, birds hovering near confinement. Drawing on export porcelain, tattoo flash, devotional imagery, and comics, Batle uses the reserve-and-border structure of blue-and-white ware to hold together elements that resist containment, safety and storytelling alike remaining provisional.
