Lluís Hortalà

Lluís Hortalà (Olot, 1959)

He studied in 2014 and 2015 at the prestigious Van der Kelen Logelain school to learn the techniques that Alfred Van der Kelen established at the end of the 19th century for decorative painting. There he prepared himself to imitate the texture of marble, which he now masterfully applies to a set of falsely voluminous objects. His purpose: to capture the viewer’s gaze and immerse it in a web of tensions and contortions with which a certain archeology of the scopic regime is put into play from the very physical affectation of the eye. The trompe-l’oeil allows Hortalà to return the reflection on art and visuality to the bodily experience through a set of objects that manage to deceive the eye over and over again -despite the fact that the viewer’s conscience seems to have discovered the trick.

Jean Baudrillard referred to trompe l’oeil as the false of the false, “a simulacrum fully conscious of play and artifice”: trompe l’oeil traps the eye, intervenes in its capacity to compose a place and undoes the sovereign position normally held by the gaze. Faced with the trompe l’oeil, the gaze can no longer impose a vanishing point with which to govern the space, but the eye is captured to become, instead, the vanishing point of the gaze projected by the objects. It is not the Cartesian eye that, projecting a gaze upon the world, thinks and then exists, but rather the subject-before-the-trapantograph is in the exact opposite position. His eye is above all looked at by the object he presumed to look at. Thus, the world of the trompe l’oeil is a world of pure visuality in which there is nothing to see: the eye of the spectator finds itself entirely dominated by another gaze.

All traces of idealism and humanist exaltation evaporate, therefore, with this exhibition. As Jacques Lacan observed, trompe l’oeil does not even rival the world of appearances, but rather the world of ideas, the Platonic world, with which it has been assumed since ancient times that on the reverse side of every appearance there is always an intentionality that transcends the object. However, this is not the case of trompe l’oeil, which reaffirms even more intensely the material agency of the world; nor is it a hyperreality, but, as Hortalà points out, trompe l’oeil “is not more real than the real, it is the real”. In trompe l’oeil the trap of visuality is expressed in all its literalness.

Selection of solo exhibitions

• 2019 Guillotina, TeclaSala, Centre d’Art de l’Hospitalet de Llobregat.
  
• 2018 Encore un moment, Monsieur le bourreau, encore un moment. F2 Galería. Madrid
  
• 2016 Il y a bien du monde aujourd’hui a Versailles, RocioSantaCruz, Barcelona.
  
• 2015 Las Tentaciones. Museu de Montserrat. Abadía de Montserrat. Barcelona.

Selection of group exhibitions

• 2022 Hiperreal. El arte del Trampantojo, Museo Nacional Thyssen Bornemisza. Madrid.
• 2020 ARCOmadrid 2021, RocioSantaCruz, Madrid
• 2019 Simbiosis, Capilla del Hospital Real de Granada
• 2018 Palau de Casavells, Art Antiques Design Architecture, Girona
• 2016 Estancias, una selección de obras de la Colección Banco Sabadell, Sala de Exposiciones Sabadell/Herrero, Oviedo
• 2017 Arts Santa Mònica, Barcelona
• 2016 Yes I Can! Centre d’art contemporain Walter Bejamin, Perpignan

Colections

• Colección Soler Villa, Valencia
• Colección Fundació ‘La Caixa’, Barcelona
• ARTIUM, Centro-Museo Vasco de Arte Contemporáneo, Vitoria-Gasteiz
• Fundación Banesto, Madrid
• Fundación Marcelino Botín, Santander
• Trust Foundation, Washington DC
• Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid
• Colección AIP, Lisboa
• Delfina Studios, London
• Colección DKV
• Colecció Banc Sabadell, Barcelona
• Fundación Banesto, Madrid
• Fundació Vila Casas, Barcelona
• Colección Norman Foster

Press:
– Mármol y poder. elPeriódico. Ramón de España. 16.04.2016
– ARCO 2020: El virus de Franco. La Razón. Gema Pajares. 26.02.2020
– Autoanàlisi del galerisme català a les portes d’Arco. ara. Antoni Ribas Tur. 23.02.2020