Paris
He was born in Paris, to a Spanish father exiled in the Spanish Civil War and a French mother. His parents divorce very soon and he remains under the guardianship of his maternal grandmother. In 1940, his father tries to take him to Spain, but he is detained at the border and imprisoned in a work camp. Little Philippe passes through several orphanages until he ends up in a convent in Albacete, where his paternal grandparents find him, who take him under their protection and take him to Fuentealbilla, the town of his father, where he spends his childhood. At the end of the forties, and at the request of his father, he returned to Paris with the help of an uncle. In Barcelona, where they stop, the boy has an experience that leaves a deep mark on his spirit: he witnesses for the first time a bullfight in which a horse is disemboweled. Already in Paris, he reunites with his mother, who has remarried and is little more than a stranger, from whom he is also separated by the language, since Philippe has almost forgotten French. In his solitary wanderings through the French capital, he visits museums and learns to love painting. With his mother he got to know the Parisian atmosphere of restaurants and bistros. At the age of thirteen, he begins his regular education in a school, where he is called a "dirty Spaniard" and has to be respected by force. His stepfather, who works in a printing press, brings him bottles of ink with which the boy begins to experiment. His vocation as a painter was born. He fills sketchbooks with scenes and characters that he sees on boulevards, in cafes and in the restaurant on the Champs-Elysées where, after finishing his studies, in the fifties, he goes to work; characters and scenes that he would later capture in his paintings and they will be one of the hallmarks of his painting. At the age of twenty, he began to work with a Catalan interior decorator with whom he learned to handle materials and techniques of decorative painting. He visits an exhibition of Goya's Los Caprichos that reaffirms his vocation: he decides to dedicate himself professionally to painting. He begins to paint in the Place du Tertre. After a period of reluctance, the French army recruits him under a disciplinary regime. The Algerian war of independence breaks out and in the bloody year of 1962 he is assigned to the area, where he witnesses terrible scenes of that "Vietnam of Africa", as he calls it. He sees his companions fall and he himself is about to die on several occasions. His rebellious temperament almost earned him a court martial. In 1964, with the Algerian nightmare over, he returned to Paris, settled in Montmartre and could finally dedicate himself fully to his art. He paints large-format paintings in which gray and red dominate, and whose protagonists are prostitutes, drunks, marginalized people, victims of war (his paintings of groups of deported Jews are famous)... He is fond of jazz and reads authors such as Henry Miller, Louis-Ferdinand Céline and Krishnamurti. In 1967 he met Carmen del Berro, a young Spanish painter, whom he married that same year and began a period of artistic collaboration and vital fulfillment. His marriage to a Spanish woman awakens his nostalgia for the land of his childhood, of which many years later he will say: «I want to stop in this land of La Mancha that marked my life so definitively; away from her, my greatest desire was to return."1 Thanks to a Luxembourg collector, he exhibited at the Louvigny gallery and achieved enormous success. Dealers and collectors make his work known throughout the rest of Europe and the United States. He receives the Savigny-sur-Orge prize, travels through Italy, paints the carnivals of Venice. In 1970 he finally returned to Spain and settled permanently in Fuentealbilla. The landscape of La Mancha and the rural types enter his paintings. He exhibits at the Círculo de Bellas Artes of Valencia. His work, which reached maturity, began to be appreciated in Spain. The family grows: the couple has four children, among them Eduardo, also a painter. In 1989, the youngest, Carmen Samantha, was diagnosed with leukemia. After three years of terrible fighting, the girl dies. Carmen and Philippe divorce. At the end of the eighties, he meets Concha Casado, with whom he marries years later, has two other children and spends the last years of his life.
Fuentealbilla
