The Step Required

This painting comes from the end of Broto's Barcelona period, one of his most productive, during which he became part of the Conspiracy Group (Grupo Trama) by the end of the seventies. This collective advocated a return to painting, and Broto consequently positioned himself as one of the greatest exponents of so-called Pintura-pintura, defending abstraction against figuration. This dark and melancholy piece is attuned to Mountain Ascent (Subida a la Montaña), also completed in 1984, a year when he created various paintings in which landscapes contrast with introduced antropic elements. Here, this element is a geometric path which penetrates schematic mountains through darkness, the 'step required' toward light. As Bonet notes, the lyrical, happy and gushing Broto revealed at the start of the 1980s began to convert himself during this year into a mystic and visionary, exploring areas less pleasant than those he had settled on before.