He was influential in the countercultural movement known as the Movida Madrileña, along with artists like Ouka Leele, Ceesepe,[a] Guillermo Pérez Villalta, film director Pedro Almodóvar, singer Alaska, and photographer Alberto García-Alix.

The artist was Ambrós, the creator of Capitán Trueno, one of the characters in the comics published by Ediciones Vértice (Superman, Spiderman, The Incredible Hulk, El Jabato, etc.).

He read underground comics by his friends Mariscal, Nazario, the Farriol brothers, Montesol, and Max, keeping in contact with them even when they went to Barcelona to create the magazine El Rrollo enmascarado.

On his first Sunday leave, he headed to the Rastro flea market to meet the painter, Ceesepe, who had placed an advertisement in Star for his comic stall, the Cascorro Factory.

He also made friends with Alberto García Alix, Montxo Algora, Miguel Ángel Arenas, Alaska, and other rising artists who used to meet at a bar called La Bobia.

[2] In 1978, they went to live in a tower of a small palace in Montjuïc, Barcelona, where they were able to meet up regularly with Mariscal, Broto, García Sevilla, Frederic Amat, and other Catalan artists.

In 1980, El Hortelano put on his first solo show entitled "Moda" (Fashion), where he displayed the 4-panel endpiece from his book of cartoons, Europa Requiem,[3] which depicts the four seasons as seen in the subway.

The exhibition brought together drawings and canvases featuring fanciful designs based on airline gear, flying costumes, and complex characters with bodies of televisions, telephones, plugs, light bulbs, spirals, and watches.

El Hortelano, sporting a sea-bass for a tie, was wheeled into the packed room on a hospital bed by Ouka Leele and a friend dressed as nurses, accompanied by a siren blaring from an ambulance they had hired.

[5] Koloroa received its première at the Fundació Joan Miró before being broadcast some time later on television on Paloma Chamorro’s program "La Edad de Oro" (The Golden Age).

He completed a series of drawings called "La Estatua del Jardín Botánico" (The Statue in the Botanic Garden), based on the verses of one of Radio Futura’s most famous songs.

He left the jacket that kept them warm on the back of a chair, the shoes and the map used for travelling on a table, a half-peeled orange and others untouched representing a life cut short.

[14] This work is the first in a series entitled El perdón de los pecados (The Forgiveness of Sins), a collection of paintings in intense, flaming yellows, oranges, and reds, featuring strings and belts criss-crossing the canvas.

At the end of the year, the magazine Diario 16 devoted an eight-page supplement to him, including drawings and articles on the senses, commissioned by José Miguel Ullán, and entitled "El planeta humano".

El Hortelano was awarded a painting grant by the Spanish Academy of History, Archaeology and Fine Arts, in Rome, for the 1990–1991 academic year.

In the eleven works of the first series that he completed in 1997, branches of trees sporting snails, transparent drops of water, and resin cross a night sky with shooting stars and tiny comets.

The second series comprised seven large canvases—each one named after a star in the Big Dipper constellation—with lyrical images depicting a solitary man and diminutive creatures juxtaposed against the immensity of the universe.

He used this composition in a poster for the 1997 Madrid Carnival, in which a smiling couple surrounded by masks contemplate a brilliant-blue dusk sky lit by the constellation, as symbolized in the city’s coat of arms.