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| Mona Lisa (1978) Photo © Simon Raven |
by Simon Raven
Explore the graffiti smothered streets of La Candelaria, in the crumbling colonial heart of Bogotá, and you will find yourself in a mountain metropolis with creativity powering through its veins. During a three month journey with my brother, Chris, travelling the length and breadth of this fascinating and complex region of South America, a very persistent artist made his presence known to us in the plazas of major cities across the country. Introducing Fernando Botero, Colombian sculptor and painter and the man responsible for a style affectionately known as “Boterismo”. Positioning himself firmly as the face of art in Colombia, I make it my mission on the last day of my journey to learn more about this curious character and his important role in re-branding Colombia as a country of culture and creativity.
Visiting the suitably named Museo Botero that is housed inside a beautiful white colonial building owned by the Banco la Republica, I’m welcomed inside the gallery by an art graduate and painter who works part time at the museum. Isabel leads me over to a self-portrait of Fernando Botero in the corner of the room. I smile at the comical image of a man with a beard, backpack and shepherd’s crook that has been drawn in typical oversized "Boterismo" style.
‘Fernando sometimes makes an appearance in his paintings,’ Isabel smiles. ‘He is an eccentric man.’
With 123 pieces of Botero’s work on display at the gallery, I wander around the first room and study a painting titled "El Estudio" which depicts a nude model who is stout and round. I find the painting both amusing and sexy. Absorbing image after image, of short men with broad masculine shoulders and ample women with wide motherly hips, Isabel explains.
‘Botero was painting the nineteen-forties, the decade he grew up in, but in the nineteen-nineties.’
Culturally, Colombia is a relatively reserved predominantly Catholic country and, although painting nudes was not considered shocking in the 1980s and 1990s, it has ultimately been Fernando’s controversial use of nude characters from his childhood in the 1940s that has drawn attention. I smile at the cheeky bronze relief of a naked couple, and "Mujer delante de una Ventara" 1990, a colourful painting of a mature nude woman wearing playful lime green high heels. She has hair protruding from her arm pits, and an equally hairy mole on her buttock. An erect nipple points suggestively out of the window with a view of the town below. Isabel finds the painting grotesque and believes the woman to be a prostitute, and that the hairy mole was added to depict the ugliness of her profession. Yet, there is something noticeably attractive in the way she is stood. Chubby yet agile, it's a refreshing portrayal of the female form in a modern world which celebrates waifish thin fashion models.
‘When Botero paints the eyes like a cow, looking in two different directions, often the subject is fictional.’
Botero was the son of a salesman who travelled by horseback. His father tragically died of a heart attack when Fernando was four. His uncle enrolled him at the age of twelve into a school for matadors for two years, but by the age of 16 his first illustrations had been published in a newspaper and his focus turned to art.
‘Instead of fighting bulls,’ Isabel grins, ’he was selling his paintings at bullfights.’
Botero travelled to Europe in the early 1950s, and absorbed the work of the Old Masters in Paris. He studied art in Madrid and began to develop his own very unique style, using vibrant colours and folk themes common in Latin American art.
‘Botero is an artist, but he is also a businessman.’ She clenches her fist. ‘He is a Paisa.’
I laugh at Isabel’s description of the people of Medellin, a city located 400km west of the capital, where Botero grew up. “Paisa” derives from the Spanish word “Paisano” (countryman), which relates to the region which is a commercial centre of coffee production and cattle farming - the bread basket of Colombia.
‘A Paisa will bite your hand off for a sale,’ Isabel smiles.
Fernando realised more people would get to know his work if he made statues to put in town squares. He was raised with a strong work ethic, and as an artist he works incredibly efficiently.
‘He manufactures his art like a production line and chews coca leaves for energy.’
Isabel invites me to see a painting from 1957, an example of the first piece where Botero started to use morphology in his work. The painting is of a guitar and she points out the contrast in size of the instruments sound hole in relation to the guitar. Fernando was experimenting. He started to play with contrast in size in order to accentuate a particular aspect of an object or person. This exaggeration aimed to let you know something about the painting.
Although it is virtually impossible not to find Botero’s often colourful charismatic paintings entertaining, there is an underlying depth to his work that is expressed through realism, such as thick black hair on a man’s hand in contrast to soft unblemished skin. His subjects are overweight, they have imperfections, but likewise they are proud and at times, even chic. I stand for a moment and study "El Presidente" 1997. The finely dressed statesman is painted humorously in typical enlarged Botero style, with the realism of chubby knees and an uncelebrated crotch working in opposition to the grandeur of the man’s broad shoulders of power. In the early 1960s, Botero began to produce works of political satire in response to Latin America’s ideological obsession with popular protests, dictatorships and militarism that dominated the region during this period. His continuing portraits along this theme, achieve a fantastic combination of both satirizing power and celebrating realism. The characters in all of his paintings are born out of the same mould, president or peasant each have their flaws, which Botero charismatically celebrates in his work. Beneath his subjects clothes there is a strong sense that we are all equal. A second painting "Presidente Durmienbto" 1998, shows a sleeping president. He is dressed in the same fine clothes as he sleeps on the bed. A bear light bulb hangs from the ceiling.
I mention to Isabel that many of the subjects in Botero’s work appear to be fair skinned and of European descent, with little representation in his work of the Indigenous people, or Afro-Colombian population living on the Pacific and Caribbean coast. Isabel leads me through the gallery and seems keen to show me one early abstract piece of work, titled “Cocos” 1952. In a similar style to Gauguin, Isabel reveals the woman in the painting is from Barranquilla.
She explains. ‘Many artists lived in this port city on the Colombian Caribbean and would often meet at the Cultural House "The Cave". Artists were drawn to Barranquilla as it was the gateway to Colombia and a cultural melting pot.’
We pass a white marble statue of a reclining woman. She has enormous legs and an enlarged torso that is out of all proportion to her fairly normal sized head and breasts. Nearby is "Leda y el Cisne" 1995, Botero’s depiction of the Greek myth of Leda and the Swan; the image of the large bird (the incarnation of Zeus), mounting a naked Leda, seeming somehow all the more shocking with Botero proportions. Next is a bronze statue of “Adán y Eva”, Botero’s hilarious impression of what these two mythical figures may have looked like. Adam’s strong barrel chest and short arms, remind me of the proud campesinos (native Colombian farm workers), we had met around Salento in the heart of the coffee growing region of Colombia. Botero’s skill as an artist has been to combine humour, controversy and realism seamlessly. The brilliant, "Hombre, muyer y nino" is a statue of a man standing on the back of a woman who is lying down. The man proudly clutches a child in his arms, while the mother beneath his feet passively carries all of the weight.
The final painting I see before returning to the street is "Hombre a Caballo". The painting depicts a white horse with exaggerated fat legs. Highlighting the contradiction of a horse’s anatomy, I suddenly realise that the large man in the painting represents his father, who travelled regularly by horse as a salesman, and who had died when Fernando was so young. I find myself imagining Botero as a young kid, selling his paintings outside the bullring in Medellin, and I begin to feel more connected to the artist who had first cried out at me for attention with his comedy statues of “fat” people and animals in the street. Botero’s voice is strong and loud; which is the very essence of art. He wants us to look and laugh, and through his determination to turn our heads, he has seized his chance to inspire thought.
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