Beckett, Molloy, Malone dies and The unnamableare unimaginable in a world that is ignorant of quantum physics. In the same way, after these advances, it becomes difficult to defend that the protagonist of a story post quantum is built according to the court in nineteenth-century's Julien Sorel of Le Rouge et le Noirto give another example. This whole phenomenon is called the effect contextualizing, but what is certain is that it goes far beyond that: any tip of the spear, you can ignore that your advanced position is due to the all millimeters in the clamp of the horn metal, the area of the rivet and the length of the handle, usually of wood, which constitute the entirety of the spear. The one in front can not ignore everything that has cost the advance, and all what many others have paid to be in that position. And for the same reason, that after those advances do not understand that their only possible place as an artist, or as a sink of darkness in general, is to be at the tip of the spear, and therefore you must accept the tyranny of the challenge of the new times, of pure creation from what is given –that is to say, never falling in the rest of the comfortable reiteration-to cooperate in the construction of the new worlds, cannot but be considered as a substitute more or less imposter, in place to challenge yourself with the hard task, you have chosen the comfort of a role already transited, and that, after his disappearance staff, will not leave any footprint on the history of the advance of human.

Few are those who, after taking the context of ever-more demanding, require themselves to the impossible. The example of the athletics maybe you'll come right now to draw the question: if an athlete does not aim to beat the record, and it remains below the mark that the man has reached before, what is the value of your effort? What is the meaning of even that is present before the world as an athlete? Do you repeat what is already achieved, without altering the range of capabilities of the human being? Because in athletics, as in all human activity, progress, and establishment, of what is at stake is the very essence of the human being. When Usain Bolt gets to run the 100-meter dash in 9,58 seconds, which causes a substantial change in the concept of man from then on. Because from then on the human being includes in its definition that is the same: that is to be “able to run the 100-meter dash in 9,58 seconds”, something that to it it was not possible to include in the definition of man. That's so hard it's what I mean when I speak of context. And art is exactly the same.

The vast and superb effort that has gone José Manuel Broto in this sense throughout his long creative life is overwhelming. In your case, in addition, by the time that you have to live, the theme of the context he would have been able to lead to a dead end roads, as to so many others. One of them, for example, is discussed both in a meeting of this same summer of 2017: the way of the overemphasis on violence, to call in some way. Since the end of the XIX century, it began to break the molds of pictorial representation, with the collapse of the so-called “central perspective”, which it gave rise, first, to those movements which brought the downfall of cubism and his conversion, as it says Gadamer, “in the complete elimination of all references to an object, to form the figure”; the generation consequential damages of abstract art as a claim of their own autonomous language, without debts to the narrative, to the representativeness or the traditional psychology; and finally, in the wake of the two world wars and their terrible consequences, socio-cultural, a further twist in the distance, but a repudiation of the concept of beauty –considered lewd after the experiences of war and especially after the visions of hell of the nazi concentration camps, the gas chambers and, before, the poison with chemicals and gasificaciones mass in the trenches of Verdun and the Somme-, that has led to a lot of artists from the second half of the TWENTIETH century to settle in the feísmo, the overemphasis on violence, the malditismo, as a ground on which to tread on the safe side. And that, from the perspective of the commitment contextualizing of which we have been speaking, it becomes a shortcut to the accommodation, and the relaxed artistic work. We'll explain.

We mentioned Broto and I this summer, who for decades –since the middle of the TWENTIETH century, that the greater part of which receives the label of a work of art of interest must include, in the opinion of the critics and the public “understand” in general, a load of meanness, violence, decay, humiliation, injustice, sickness, and death are relevant, and that from this foundation, the authors construct a work that out already with the positive consideration. Not only is a hangover of the death by murder of the concept of beauty –in the classic sense, or the less conventional, but also an easy solution to matching with the substrate pussy prodding our current culture. How simple and easy it is to build any discourse or literary on these parameters! If it was a stroke of scandal, escabrosidad, the viewer's attention is already focused. What then to come, in addition to enjoying the patina of the procaz, rebellious, non-conformist, will be equal to that range or not there are other dimensions, because only with the alleged breach of molds that desmadrado supposed to be guaranteed a minimum of acceptance. There are so many examples like this in art and literature of the last decades...! In that last meeting, this summer, we discussed the tremendous books of the american Donald Ray Pollock, as “The devil all the time,” for example, or “Knockemstiff”, that, while in this case to be great works, they do not thereby have avoided the temptation to turn to the insurance of success cited. And many, many other examples. In art, the case is still more frequently. From the other Pollock, the artist is pierced for the distress and alcohol, passing by Basquiat and the “young british artist” with Tracey Emin to the head, all the company of Paul McCarthy, Jonathan Meese, Santiago Sierra, or Teresa Margolles, what is certain is that malditismo irreverent has been assumed that their works, instead of starting from the start line, they did quite a few meters ahead. And on top, all is said, the route assumes that choice of departure facilitates –so to speak - its fit in the contemporary world. The interest is unleashed today as the hero of the novel is revealed sick and obsessive, or sneaky and frustrated, or upset by the experience unspeakable childhood; or when the plastic work collects the semen of the lovers brought in and carried by the part of the artist in question in a search drunk I don't know know well what a strange prototype of happiness unattainable; or when the layers of different materials that are spread over the canvas can be discovered phallic symbols or cannibals or blasphemous that speak of a very intense derived non-conformist artist. In any case, what that malditismo occurs in the warm, reader or viewer's gentrifying of our time is the ability to subvert, at least in the scenario a fantasy of a work of art on which to project their weaknesses and their passions, the most intimate, the monotonous and routine that it has closed, an everyday safe but devoid of vertigo that every cell needs to replicate.

 Of course, here we cite relevant names, but there is a glimpse of the huge herd of pseudoartistas and pseudoescritores that have attempted to use this shortcut, and that have flooded trash the whole picture pseudocultural of our time.

 What is really difficult, which is not within the reach of almost anyone, is to produce a work of contemporary art, with all that this implies of load context (and we have already mentioned before), which also represents a new milestone in its field, without the use of these mechanisms mendacious of the feísmo, the malditismo, in short, to produce a work of art that is opposite without subterfuge to the challenge of his time from the heart of the problem, which has to do with the search for new forms of expression, new images (in the case of the visual arts) that distils the new realities and the new feelings of the human being, that show the new direction that the development of a man –according to the new capabilities and new technologies - can be raised... to not know what the ultimate objective, perhaps the one that Kubrick outlined in the final scenes of their particular Odyssey –title is not innocent, and that obviously includes the tradition of the search, from Homer to Joyce, and so on.

 And that's just what Broto has succeeded with their extraordinary work: to open up new avenues of knowledge, new ways previously impossible even to imagine, new perceptions of the matter and energy that embraces all things. And all this from the art pure, free of fillers (in the tradition, therefore, the abstract, but trascendiéndolo), without the need to rely on subterfuge vexing one. And this approach, in truth, is the most difficult to follow, because between the artist and his work there is nothing to solve the equation. The shock is in the raw, without airbagand with all the consequences.

José Manuel Broto incurs for both his work in a great boldness: without resorting to those bonds of game that we have been spoken, it develops a research of new forms, absent in reality until he reveals, and that nothing should be those bulls of procacidad, blood, evil, free, shame and perversion. His personal style, which has been framed within what has been called the neoabstracto, involves a rebase full of the assumptions of abstraction, that concept that was formulated in the beginning with the sunset view on the removal of external loads to the artistic language, as we have already commented. But here we must remember what is stated in the previous section: the context. The abstraction at this stage of the evolution, almost to the point of reaching in the so-called Fifth Age, the celebrated Singularity (see “The Singularity is near”, Ray Kurzweil, book absolutely essential), can't stick only to that purpose a claim on merely representative. As is known, “at the time of the Singularity, there will be no distinction between human and technology,” says Kurzweil. “And this will be so not because humans have become what we today understand by machines, but rather because the machines have progressed to become human and more than human”. “The Singularity will allow us to overcome the problems of human aging and will expand greatly the human creativity, we will preserve and enhance the intelligence that evolution has bestowed on us, and at the same time we'll overcome the profound limitations of biological evolution”. After this, the call Sixth Era (this is science, although the terminology may sound sect), the intelligence will saturate the matter and energy, and spread beyond its origin on earth.

 All of this is the vector of the present advance of human evolution, and ignoring it is not only a problem of lack serious in terms of contextualization, at the time when the artistic creation, that is to say, the role as an artist, but also a serious lack as a human being no more, because not knowing where you are and where you are going is not the one who has been locked up for centuries in a contest open to the gods for the conquest of the Land and the sky.

The work of José Manuel Broto is located clearly in this season. And it's one of the few that exist today that are! Many of his works, many of which comprise this new series called “Other universes” and that is the trunk of the exhibition in the gallery Fernández-Braso of Madrid, having been executed by hand, presented an appearance of perfection quasi-mechanical, as if they had been made with computer-based tools. In some cases, especially in some papers, Broto has made use of these resources, but in the acrylics, a few of the large format, it is his hand, his pulse, his mastery of the guide forms to this new abstraction. Their imagination, their ability to give birth to new forms and almost would say that new colors (as the color it is, in the end, a vibration of energy), his absolute control of the structure and the composition (something that is only in the hands of the great artists), the boldness of his approach-painting within the parameters that we have mentioned, makes his work one of the monuments of the present painting. And in your case, not only of the present painting, as it carries breaking the molds of the abstraction from fifty years ago.

“Other universes” affects, therefore, on the need for access to the new realities that bring us closer to full speed. The effect of pulse magnetic that transmit these works, based on the same funds vibrating with the canvases are performed which ruled out the colouring flat to open up a scenario wave that gives a strange depth to the pieces, puts us in a scenario of strong contemporary science, in addition to plastic obviously refers. The concept famous Greenberg, flatness (flatness), who ruled in the beginning the painting moderna –the one feature that made it fall first critical attention in what the spectator had before it was a box, that is to say, a field of two-dimensional, he has been assaulted by Broto and annihilated. The depth of the parts of this series reaches enormous dimensions projective. The shapes are well defined that hang like planets over that background vibratory open an internal perspective that does not end. As when one looks at the night sky, no clouds and no moon: there is a background noise, the constant vibration of the universe, and a deep-felt infinite that mark the direction of our steps.

(Impossible not to recall here the stunning final dialogue from the first season of True Detective. Under a dark sky and crashed, leaving the hospital, an ailing Rust, looking at the blackness dotted with points of light, he tells his colleague Martin: “some time Ago there was only darkness, but if you ask me now, I think that the light is winning.” It is a direct reflection and optimistic about the science, the art, in order, on the role of man in the universe).

Another of the peculiarities of the new series of Broto is the representation of the gestural, own of the movement championed theoretically, the art critic quoted (the abstract expressionism), but in his case, in a process measured already, contents, in which the stroke progresses with subtlety marking at the same time as the echo of the shape of gesture and a pulse vibration, which in turn is an echo of that unfolds in the infinite background. This mixture is a wonder of visual and sensitive at the same time, and makes the works to emit frequencies in different waves, exactly as the universe, which is full of " otherness." Even when the forms of those “other universes” appear as rounded and well-defined in its outline, the color in your interior is not flat, there is a “color field”, by further referring to Greenberg. No, in this series Broto dismantles the color field and all areas caught several and different frequencies. The effect, as we have already mentioned, is pure energy emitted beyond the false double dimension of the box.

A step beyond what gives when also uses forms thin and elongated, but forms at the end of the cape, billowing in the first term, not in the background. Here the “other universe” is manifested in a way purely immaterial, not as a corpuscle, but as a wave, in the well-known terminology einsteniana of the light. The color is almost electric of these thin bands, also arpegian in series house, gives the suggestion of cracks to a different reality, as if they were doors pointed that allow you to infer presence, lives, parallel developments and that we still are unapproachable. The extreme formal beauty, the compositions presented talks of that saturation of intelligence that is about to come, and under whose perspective nothing will be left out of it.

Intelligence, mystery (without him there is art, beauty at the end, surprise constant visual, balance, and vibration, pulse and wide-ranging, the experience of travel by the work of José Manuel Broto is a way to enrich life with the light of what is to come.

Carlos Jover. Mallorca, September 2017.