Philippe Hortala

Philippe Hortala was born and died in Toulouse. This lover of life loved his city and sometimes left it to come back to it better. After graduating from the Beaux-Arts in Toulouse in 1983, Hortala moved to Barcelona for nine months and painted the Views of Barcelona series. In 1986, he took a joint workshop in Blagnac with Clément Thomas, Alain Fabre and Daniel Bonnal. After his “punk years” - to use the title of an exhibition devoted to the period 1980-1986 - Hortala gives the feeling of changing perspective and here appears Happy Days, the title of a series of paintings in which everything revolves around the same point: its own vision of the world.

In 1987, he received a Hohenberg Foundation grant and stayed in New York. Two years later, he returned to live and work in Toulouse where he remained until 1998, while making regular stays in Naples until 1991. There he produced numerous views of the city, and painted the series of the Combat du octopus and lobster. Between 1992 and 1997, he produced the Strawberries and Potagers series and made sculptures on the theme of food (from kitchen utensils) or representing birds - using gardening tools.

Philippe Hortala died on October 2, 1998 in his Toulouse studio. In Ben's little alphabet book entitled The Truth from A to Z, we discover, between the word “horizon” and “humor”, “Hortala”, defined as the “Little King-Kong of Toulouse”.