Untitled

After taking his first steps as an artist within the formalistic ascetic beginnings of a minimalism inspired by the French group Support-Surface, Broto gradually changed direction over the course of the eighties towards an increasingly personal idiom, which was Expressionist in style and had Romantic symbolism and atmospheres. He did so with refined sobriety while demonstrating an ever greater mastery over pictorial substance. This enabled him to attain, already in the second half of the eighties, an artistic quality and an expressive vigour that are not frequently seen together. In this way, as can be appreciated in the pictures on which we are commenting, the unity of his rich pictorial backgrounds, which blend together atmospherically without the disappearance of all their components (plays on light, rhythms, impastos, interrupted brushstrokes, splashes) can provide a background for the imposition of a flattened geometrical figure that operates like a witness, and, moreover, is not only a physical, but also a conceptual contrast.