In the early eighties, the hermetic atmospheres and almost uniform, extremely solemn, surfaces of Broto's work became more lyrical and emotive. As he was interested in the memory and tradition of painting, he worked along a line that linked up with informal abstraction, giving particular value to the expressive possibilities of colour. The gesture, often in a semiautomatic state, was freed in stains, but the composition remained strongly structured. Sense títol (1982) belongs to the period when Broto structures and lays out the colours, which tend to occupy the whole surface of the picture with clean, bright, highly luminous chromatic impacts. The white of the canvas, which in earlier works he had left almost raw, was harmoniously coated. The use of new technical procedures or plastic resources, such as oil, enabled the rich pictorial material to work from the action and vitality of a certain abstract impressionism. After a journey to Italy, Broto's work became very forceful. Baroque traces and metaphorical forms of the Byzantine world began to appear in his work, shapes of monuments and mountains conceived with great sobriety. The increasingly uniform backgrounds darkened and the iconographic repertory was enhanced by very simple figurative references. Those ambiguous images are referential elements in an essentially emblematic sense, with a marked preference for Romantic symbols or minimal forms, which are dialectically connected to the pictorial base of the work. In an universe of confrontation between hazard and order, the landscapes, the ruined towers and obelisks, the steps, the prints, the traces and the drippings lay out the space of memory in his painting. Somewhere between constructive and lyrical, he is interested in the Abstract Expressionism of Pollock and Rothko and leaves the colour free in a sumptuously sombre, intense painting. In 1984 he moved to Paris, where he painted a simple cycle of pictures related to the troubled waters of lakes, rivers, springs and waterfalls. Celebración en el lago I (1984), one of those works, breathes a disturbing atmosphere, Romantic and furious, which battles between chaos and a strange void. The black, which occupies almost all the canvas, is whipped, scraped by a sharp point that drags a violent light out of the darkness. In the works of this period, there are obvious references to the classic pictorial language of Antoni Tàpies, Robert Motherwell and Cy Twombly.

Eva Solans