SOFIA, BULGARIA.- The Union of Bulgarian Painters presents El Hortelano, on view through August 28, 2005. The collection brings together a selection of El Hortelano’s pictorial work from 1981 to the present: a hundred works on canvas and paper, where disproportionate characters are twisted and distorted in strange postures and stand out inside marine, heavenly and underground worlds.

José Alfonso Morera Ortiz (Valencia, 1954) became known as El Hortelano as a result of a long convalescence which kept him in bed for over a year and a half but which enabled him to dedicate himself entirely to painting and reading, giving up his Pharmacy studies.

In 1974 he left his native Valencia for Madrid, where he became involved in setting up the Movida Madrileña, along with personalities like Ouka Lele, Ceesepe, Guillermo Pérez Villalta, Pedro Almodóvar and García Alix. He later moved to Barcelona and it was at this time that he first started to exhibit and write for national and foreign magazines, especially as of 1980 with his stay in New York and Mexico.

In the 1980s, he started to travel the world spending long spells, financed by scholarships, in New York and Italy, as well as trips to Finland, Holland, Tunisia, Russia and Egypt.

At this time, his work was imbued with bright colours, dense and dynamic compositions that evolved into a more somber palette and more elaborate techniques in the 1990s. His canvases then served him to experiment with linseed oil, resins, waxes and natural materials, creating series like Paternoster (1991-4) and Savitaipale (1996).

El Hortelano, according to himself, “paints the human animal living in the city, with his anxieties - the biological side of everyday life and at the same time his magical dimension, emphasizing the mystical and redeeming nature of painting”.

The late nineties saw the birth of his Osa Mayor, a series of square-shaped, oil-on-canvas paintings about the universe; they are created as a tribute to the cosmos, like those shown in this collection. At the same time, he created other works on coral reefs, water and underwater worlds.

In 2001, the Centro Cultural Conde Duque de Madrid dedicated a large retrospective exhibition to him, which confirmed his position as one of the most prestigious painters of his generation. El Hortelano: retrospectiva 1976-2001 brought together over one hundred and twenty works from his previous twenty five years of artistic creation and exhibited the Osa Mayor series for the first time, along with the triptych, Mar Rojo, which was completed especially for the occasion.

A year later, he started the Humano series, which brings together a hundred small-sized oil paintings based on the shape and symbolism of the human hand, the signature of artists since the birth of Humanity.