José Manuel Broto’s earliest steps as an artist are grounded in the aesthetic principles championed by the French group as well as in his role in founding Trama, a multidisciplinary collective that defended what was called

 Pintura-pintura 

, or pure painting, advocating the act of painting in opposition to the conceptual trend in vogue in Catalonia at the time and also as an alternative to the movement which was gaining force in the art world. Broto’s response was the development of a minimalist visual idiom pursuing a combination of chromatic forms eschewing any avowed meaning.

After this period of

 Pintura-pintura 

, in the 1980s Broto evolved towards a brand of abstraction lending a major role to colour, coupled with abstract forms or references to geometric elements. His way of interpreting figures always found a middle ground between Figuration and Abstraction materialised in a gestural vernacular reminiscent of early

 Lyrical Abstraction 

A tendency that emerged within abstract painting in 1945 in France, as a reaction against the excessive coldness of

 Geometric Abstraction 

A term introduced in the 1920s to name a kind of abstract art based on scientific and mathematical principles. The main goal was to eliminate all subjectivity in favour of art based on the essence of geometric forms. Its main champions were Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944), Kazimir Malevich (1879-1935) and Piet Mondrian (1872-1944).

and attempting to give more room to the expression of the artist’s emotions. The movement favoured colour over form through techniques like watercolour and oil paint, which would be the most widely used by its practitioners. Major sources of inspiration were the painting of Vassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) and automatism in Surrealist painting. Key names within the movement are Pierre Soulages (1919), Georges Mathieu (1921-2012) and Hans Hartung (1904-1989).

, featuring elements like stairs, grilles, fountains... —elements also present in the works of Joan Miró (1893-1983) and Antoni Tàpies (1923-2012)— invariably floating against a background, thus conferring an aura of mystery and mysticism. Colour and brushwork here are of primary importance. The nervous gesture, the spontaneous brushstroke, the stains and drips, the use of scribbling reminiscent of calligraphic writing, are all reminders of his connection with .

Broto succeeds in making this oil painting from 1983 a forceful piece of work by superimposing colours, combining a succession of impastos with layers of more diluted paint, thus obtaining glazings and transparencies that give the work an exceptional brio and vibration.

The ziggurat at the centre of the composition is very similar to another one included in a painting from 1984, titled A. T. in homage to Antoni Tàpies, an artist Broto is highly indebted to. It is a subtle, romantic, possibly allegoric landscape in which the ziggurat is an element connecting Earth and Sky, the mundane and the spiritual.