“I don’t paint fat people.” The painter Fernando Botero, who died today at the age of 91 in the Principality of Monaco, always stuck to this with emphasis. A statement with one or two touches of irony and satire, like some of the compositions in his work. He preferred to explain his work initially as an exploration of volume and the “sensuality of form” as a goal. But painting and sculpting figures and bulky objects whose breadth defied the dimensions of a world that for centuries combined the limits of beauty with slender bodies was his way of thinking, saying and synthesizing a unique universe.
Fernando Botero said that everything happened by chance. It was in the late 1950s, after passing through Mexico City, where he lived in 1958. The decisive turning point began with the discovery of the work of the muralist Diego Rivera. Works characterized by their monumentality to reach a wider audience and by the desire to represent the history of the Mexican people and other political demands.
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“There was a change in his plastic thinking that led him to experiment with these expanded volumes,” explains Universidad de los Andes scholar Ana María Franco. But the epiphany came in the middle of designing a mandolin, this small four-string guitar with a curved body. “The sound hole,” continues Ana María Franco, “was very small compared to the rest of the instrument and so he accidentally found the volume that would set the tone for the rest of his work.”
It was a distortion of reality that corresponded to the relentless effort of European modernist artists since the end of the 19th century to distance themselves from academic representations of reality. It was the continuation of the search for all the “isms,” starting with Cubism, then to Fauvism and Expressionism and everything else. What happened is that Botero’s painting kept a foot in the classic figurative composition with landscapes, portraits or still lifes and his contribution was accompanied by an extravagant and curved view of the world.
“In this way, Botero found a way to question other forms of expression based on purely plastic principles. It was a very significant meeting in the Colombian and Latin American context, because together with other artists of that time they promoted artistic modernism.” He refers to his contemporary artists such as the German Guillermo Wiedemann, who has lived in Bogotá since the late 1940s, or the Catalan Alejandro Obregón, Colombian since he landed on the coast as a teenager. They were artists who broke through seams and, together with Botero, encouraged experimentation with other shapes and other materials. “If we add to this his undeniable skills as a public relations professional, we already have the entire framework to understand why his unique language was so well received in Colombia and the world,” says academic Franco.
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Christian Padilla, who has a doctorate in art and is an expert in his work, emphasizes the importance of the mural painters of the 1940s. Add the names of Antioqueños like him, Pedro Nel Gómez (1899-1984) and Ignacio Gómez Jaramillo (1910-1970) to reconstruct his journey. “The great paradigm of the time was to stop making small paintings. And the idea that mobilized them was to create their own Latin American art, with different characters, native and indigenous, that did not have the same volumes as the figures depicted in European art.”
The formula was explored with thicker mestizo figures and a certain heroic halo. “Here lies the root of Botero’s interest in Hercules. His early works clearly reflect this.” After his time in Mexico, he traveled to the San Fernando Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid to complete his education. In the rooms of the Prado Museum he indulges in the works of the Renaissance and comes across a groundbreaking book for his conceptual framework: “The Renaissance Painters” by the American critic Bernhard Berenson.
“Berenson said that Renaissance painters were the first to invent methods to project the impression of three-dimensionality in their scenes, which until then had been depicted in a flat and symbolic manner,” Padilla explains. The ingredients and colors to implement his suggestion were given. “The love of Renaissance painters and admiration for Latin American muralists were later added to his enthusiasm for pre-Hispanic and Colombian popular art,” says Christian Padilla.
It refers to the small clay crafts depicting a horse with its saddlebags, produced in the Boyacá department. Concerns changed, but volume concerns remained unchanged. Then he took it to the greatest possible consequences. After the mandolin, he continued trying to reduce certain parts of other objects to give the impression that the outlines were larger. Then came the faces of bullfighters, farmers or famous figures of world art.
The result? A seal or artistic world, usually used to describe the world like any other adjective that appears in the RAE: the “boteriano”. Some keys to this universe, which art dealer Irene Acevedo describes as “colossal” and “clear,” can be found in works such as “Monna Lisa at 12,” an interpretation of the famous portrait by Lisa Gherardini, or the bronze sculpture of a giant cat lies in the Heart of Barcelona’s Rambla del Raval.
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