This invidualistic artistic figure managed to remain on the fringes of the main artistic groups and tendencies in his native Catalonia. Included in what has come to be called the “Nueva Figuración Calatana”, he always had a very personal concept of painting. Like any great artist, his professional development was closely linked to a search for his own identity.

During the 1950s his work was naif style. We must look for its roots in Catalan Romanesque painting. The spirit of the paintings at San Clemente de Taül emanate from some of his compositions. The naif style of Rousseau is more recent. Rousseau’s primtivism, the magic and irreality of his images are also present in Brotat’s work.

Although he was a profoundly figurative painter, in the 1960s he joined the wave of informalism that was sweeping Spain. It was at that time that he approached the milieu of the Dau al Set group. His painting went through a process of abstraction. The power of his work rests on his search for texture and reliief rather than simpliy line and color. Dense brushstrokes, expressive gestures, take prominence.

This entire period of informalist abstraction became a stage for the search for the painter’s true self. His figurative identity rose from the ashes, marking Joan Brotat’s definitive trayectory and becoming his trademark in the 1970s. Abandoning all experimental concern for new non-figurative forms of expression, he became the painter of melancholy faces. Enormous heads that hold features frozen in sorrow. There is no color grading. Colors are applied in large flat patches distributed to fill in surfaces defined by lines. They are geometric-type areas that give a certain rigidity to the human figures in a world with an irreal quality. So a search for realist spatial perspectives is useless.

The representation of his personal universes and stories is not limited to canvas and oils. Drawings, prints, and ceramics are media Brotat also used, giving them a characterstic and untransferable stamp.