Gil Batle: Double Life: Gallery Two • In-Person and Online

ON VIEW: MAY 28 – AUGUST 21, 2026

OPENING RECEPTION: THURSDAY, MAY 28, 6 - 8 PM

Ricco/Maresca is pleased to present painted plates by Gil Batle, the gallery’s first presentation devoted exclusively to this body of work. Following Hatched in Prison (2015), Re-Formed (2018), and a one-person booth at the Independent Art Fair (2019), the exhibition continues Batle’s chronicle of incarceration, survival, and transformation.

Born in San Francisco in 1962 to Filipino parents, Batle spent twenty years in and out of five California prisons for fraud and forgery. While incarcerated, his self-taught gift for drawing became a clandestine tattoo practice, both protection and currency. After his release, he relocated to a small island in the Philippines, where his carved ostrich eggshells transformed prison memories into spiraling narratives. The plates belong to a later chapter: flat, frontal, domestic, and deceptively familiar.

The series began when Batle encountered a Japanese Blue Willow–style dish whose serene fish-scale ornament suddenly suggested the outline of a prison shank. Captivated by that slippage between beauty and threat, he began painting in blue acrylic on found white plates. Island animals, foliage, birds, cages, blades, and figures from his past mingle in compressed symbolic scenes. Drawing on export porcelain, tattoo flash, devotional imagery, and comics, Batle uses the plate’s reserve-and-border structure to contain violence, longing, and uneasy calm.