Toni Batllori Obiols died early on Saturday at his home in Teià, shortly after delivering his daily column, which he published in the Politics section of La Vanguardia since 1994. The one that appeared in the newspaper yesterday, the last one, was dedicated to the military Easter and the King’s speech on the increase in military spending.
The cartoonist and multidisciplinary artist maintained his good humor and desire to work until the last moment. Born in Barcelona in 1951, he began collaborating with La Vanguardia more than three decades ago, in 1991 in the Sports section, but his sharp wit made him the counter-chronicler of political news in 1994, which he dissected every day with his drawings in his strip Ninots. He was not a cartoonist, he declared, but he quickly learned to summarize the protagonists of current news in a few brilliant strokes.
Every night, when some editors had already finished their work, he would appear in the newsroom with his helmet under his arm. Whether it was cold or hot, or even rainy, he would go from Teià on a motorcycle to the newsroom and there he would light up his comic strip. He sat at his table and read the political chronicle that he had to accompany with his strip. Every day, a new challenge. He sometimes asked a question, talked to one or the other about anything, but it was noticeable that his head did not stop guessing. He had to find the idea and he couldn’t delay. Sometimes with the strip still in pencil and close to closing time, he would go through the Editing section to obtain the linguistic approval of the Spanish and Catalan versions. On occasion, a play on words forced him to change the drawing, as happened with one of his strips dedicated to Minister Montoro. While in Spanish the Minister of Finance of the Aznar government could see his duster, what he saw in Catalan was the llautó, and Batllori solved it with a different drawing for each of the languages.
Son of Antoni Batllori Jofré, also a cartoonist, he showed great admiration for his father’s work and dedicated several exhibitions to him. In recent years, he managed the Fons Batllori in Teià, which was established with the donation of drawings, books and pieces from his father’s collection.
As a multidisciplinary artist, he undertook projects of all kinds, always renewing the illusion of a child before any company that he proposed, no matter how small. He called it carrots: “I like to plant a carrot here and another there, with an idea, with a dream, with the outline of something, and then recover it, make it grow and mature,” he said in one of his last conversations. And he added, in the wake of the news of the cancer diagnosis: “But now I’m out of carrots. I dedicate the day to ordering and filing my things, to make everything a bit clear, with the sole hope of sitting down at sunset to draw the strip”.
In this ordering, he had begun to classify his comic strips from these three decades and kept them in folders for years. Among his artistic objects, he made some magical boxes, like the Barret de pluja, where he only rained under his hat. He had a few, characterized by a certain Brossian spirit, and in these last few weeks he was working on them to be able to exhibit them in an exhibition.
One of the projects that he undertook with the greatest enthusiasm was the Malip (Monument to Lost Illusions), a bonsai branch turned into a 4-meter-high granite block, which can be seen in the small square formed by La Diagonal, La Rambla from Poblenou and Bolívia street. He launched a crowdfunding operation among his friends to raise a first sum that would allow him to face his work. In exchange for 200 euros, he gave his collaborators a small bronze Malip and an intermittent report on the entire creation process, from the first sketches in 2012 and the trip to the quarry in Extremadura to select the block of granite from which it would come. his sculpture, until its inauguration in 2015. Needless to say, such a creative gift far exceeded the amount contributed by each micro-patron. But that was also one of his hallmarks: to share his illusion with his friends.
Among his many books and anthologies of drawings, in 2018 he published Dibuixa’m una patata where Batllori tells all his secrets as a cartoonist, starting from the basic line of drawing a potato. “In fact, it all starts with this shape halfway between the circle and the lump that we call a potato,” he wrote. A form within the reach of everyone, regardless of age and ability”.
Toni Batllori began publishing in the late sixties in magazines such as Oriflama and Patufet. He also collaborated in the following decade in El Papus, and later in El Triangle and El Jueves. In the press, before establishing himself in La Vanguardia for the last three decades, he collaborated in the newspapers El Noticiero Universal, Diario de Barcelona, ??Avui and El País. His vast work received numerous recognitions, such as the awards for the Best Observer of Political Reality, from the College of Politologists and Sociologists (2000), the Gat Perich International Humor Award (2004), the Joan Junceda (2004), the Ciutat of Barcelona in the category of media (2007) and the National Communication of the Generalitat of Catalonia (2015).
In this link of the newspaper library of La Vanguardia you can see all his strips throughout three decades of daily work.
