Fernando Botero

Fernando Botero

The art of Fernando Botero is widely known, revered, paraphrased, imitated and copied, For many, his characteristic rounded, sensuous forms of the human figure, animals, still lifes and landscapes represent the most easily identifiable examples of the modern art of Latin America. For others, he is a cultural hero.To travel with Botero in his native Colombia is to come to realize that he is often seen less as an artist and more as a popular cult figure. In his native Medellín he is mobbed by people wanting to see him, touch him or have him sign his name to whatever substance they happen to be carrying. On the other hand, Botero's work has been discredited by those theorists of modern art whose tastes are dictated more by intellectual fashion than by the perception of the power of his images. Botero is undoubtedly one of the most successful artists in both commercial and popular terms, and an artist whose paintings deal with many of the issues that have been at the heart of the Latin American creative process in the twentieth century.

An indispensable figure on many international art and social scenes on at least three continents, Botero's 'persona' might be compared to that of one of the seventeenth -century artists he so much admires, Peter Paul Rubens. Rubens represents the epitome of the standard notions of the "baroque". His own fleshy, eroticized figures exist in a world of exuberance and plenitude in both the realms of the sacred and the profane. Like Rubens, Botero is an individual whose intense engagement with the world around him enriches his perceptions, heightens his discernment of both the material and spiritual nature of specific things, places and people. Also in the manner of Rubens, Botero celebrates the palpable, quantifiable tangibilities of earthly existence without slighting more ethereal values.

Rubens was a diplomat by both profession and character. Polished in manner and eloquent in his words, he moved easily within many realms of Baroque society in his native Flanders as well as in Italy, England, France and Spain. Botero is similarly peripatetic and likewise gifted in his comprehension of the wide variety of human values and emotions. He is, in both his personality and his art, as comfortable with bullfighters as with presidents, with nuns as with socialites. His images of this range of types presents his...

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...milar to its aspect of the 1930s. In many of his paintings Botero recalls both the mundane and the extraordinary events of life in such a town. In a painting such as the 1995 House, a woman stands in her doorway observing the passing scene. Nothing seems to change, but we know that any instant something amazing - wonderful or horrifying - could happen. In a 1994 composition we observe just such an occurrence. The Woman Falling from a Balcony portrays a young woman, dressed only in a green slip and green highheeled shoes, flying through the air as she is observed by a man standing below. Does this represent a terrible accident, a suicide or a vision of the observer? We can only know the ultimate outcome in our imaginations. In paintings such as this Botero seems to be creating visual analogues to the extraordinary imagination of Gabriel García Márquez who, in his novels and short stories, has created a world that may be described as both banal and wondrous. The imagination of the painter, like that of the writer, conjures up fantastical happenings in village settings in which, seemingly, little or nothing changes throughout the years.

Bibliography:

www.artisan.net/botero.htm