The Signal II

Having initially deployed a severe formalist style characterised by a minimalism derived from the French Support-Surface group, during the 1980s Broto evolved towards a more personal idiom of an expressionist, symbolist type with a markedly romantic feel. He used this approach with a refined sobriety, demonstrating an increasing mastery of the fundamental aspects of painting. By the second half of the 1980s this had allowed him to achieve a sense of volume and expressive vigour that are rarely encountered together in the work of a single artist. As a result, and as can be seen in the present work, the unity of his complex pictorial backgrounds, which fuse together in an atmospheric way but without the loss of the individual elements (interplay of light, rhythms, impasto, churned up brushstrokes, splashed-on paint), is used to support the image of a flat, geometrical form that acts as a witness and which is also a conceptual as well as a physical contrast.