Many artists tend to dedicate themselves to one main discipline while yearning for another. The almost hidden passion of Toni Batllori Obiols was that of a sculptor. When he discovered the rocks in the woods of Olost, where he shared a farmhouse for a change of scenery, he soon took up hammer and chisel. The culmination with the art that he baptized as that of chipping stone was reached with the work Malip, based on a huge block that he bought in a quarry in Extremadura. The Malip today occupies a pre-eminent space in the city.
The caricaturist Toni constitutes the backbone of a trade that ran through his veins, inherited from his father, Antoni Batllori Jofré –a disciple of the mythical Junceda- who drew in the Patufet and the TBO. His style, however, is something completely opposite. He began by deconstructing the stroke until he turned the caricature into a defining flash, far from any realistic identification. The daily strip was the ideal container for the scenes he invented.
This was precisely the format at the bottom of the page of El Burladero, the weekly satirical section that with a heterogeneous group of daring people we began to publish in La Vanguardia in 1991. The ritual that he maintained with him, every Friday, consisted of breakfasts that lasted until noon when he gave me the drawing that would come out the next day. After five years, Toni inaugurated his Ninots space in the politics section where he has drawn uninterruptedly until this very Saturday.
With the man, the artist and the friend we had other adventures together, in the illustration of books, the design of posters for shows and the modeling of Pepito Napoleón, a ventriloquism doll, who looked a lot like Aznar. Not long ago, eating together near the sea, with a small voice due to the sudden illness, he expelled his usual vitality, avoiding lamentation, encouraged and determined to never stop drawing in this diary, which he has managed to date. the last day. There are very few artists capable of being expeditious with a sheet of paper and seeing the light through a stone.
