Fernando Botero for the collective imaginary

Barcelona,

Since he began painting his fifteen and until his death in 2023, Fernando Botero developed an extraordinarily prolific and also varied work in his techniques (3,000 oils are owed, about two hundreds of sculptures and about 12,000 pencil drawings, carboncillo, cake and blood), but the style that gave him a celebrity, characterized by his attention to the volumes, began to take place in 1956 while living in Mexico and after drawing in his workshop the form of a mandolin. The sound cavity of this instrument was executed very small, underlining the contrast between the generous contours that gave the object and its tiny center; Thus, the piece was as monumental as deformed.

That mandolin, as we said, was the beginning of its language, based on the monumentality of the bodies and the use of vibrant colors; An easily identifiable style that Botero never tried to flee: Without its own style an artist does not exist. All good painters have managed to create their own style consistent with their ideas, immediately recognizable (…). If I am happy, first, of having always lived from the painting, even very poorly in my early times in New York, when I sold drawings at ten dollars. And, above all, having found its own style. A worldview that did not exist and that is me because I do it. The style is the creative ability to do something different that is within one and is reflected with great emotion in the painting. An example that illustrates this is the simplest way of nature: an orange, which however is very difficult to paint. The magnificent thing is that when someone sees an orange in a painting, he automatically recognizes that it is an orange of Van Gogh, by Picasso, Cézanne or Botero.

Something more than one hundred of those works, between sculptures, oils, watercolors, bloody, charcoal and pencil drawing, are part until next July of the anthology dedicated by the Palau Martorell of Barcelona, the most extensive so far of this author in Spain and arrival from the Bonaparte Palazzo of Rome. Commissioned by her daughter, Lina Botero, and Cristina Carrillo de Albornoz, is structured in a dozen thematic sections and has some unpublished works for the public, or almost, including two tributes to past teachers: La Menina, according to Velázquez (which he kept in his study in Paris) and Tribute to Mantegna (For forty years in a private collection without expository transfer).

Both exemplify another of the aspects that this assembly wants to emphasize: the desire to bind with the great figures of art history, especially since with twenty years he arrived in Spain and in the Prado Museum he began to admire the aforementioned Velázquez, Goya and Tiziano, in addition to Picasso, whom he considered his first reference. The majority of the series that make up this exhibition highlight the happy vocation of Colombian’s production, by him expressly formulated (Art should produce pleasure), But in Barcelona they have also stressed their two projects focused on the complaint that, for constituting a rarity in the whole of their career, had a greater media impact: those dedicated to violence in their country and the torture of Abu Ghraib.

Fernando Botero: A universal teacher. Palau Martorell, Barcelona

A first section of the tour reviews their versions of the teachers, first, as we advance, in the Prado and then in Toscana, with the Renaissance painters (Da Vinci, Piero Della Francesca); He then wanted to display his gaze on Durero, Van Eyck, Rubens, Enter and Manet. Although his language does not rest on the codes of any of them, Botero acknowledged that the greatness of any artist has his germ in the knowledge of tradition. Of those creators only took songs such as starting points and never styles: here we will find inspired works, in addition to Las Meninasin The Arnolfini from van eyck, Miss Rivière of admission La Fornarina from Rafael.

Its handling of the sculpture, axis of a second section, had to do with its concern for providing tottility and appearance of three -dimensionality to its pictorial volumes, restlessness in which in turn the lessons it took in Florence of Bernard Berenson would be fundamental. It would be in the middle of the seventies when he began to sculpt small -format pieces, his own hand being his model first. As for their drawings, both preparatory and autonomous works have arrived at Barcelona, and we know that his skilled job considered him an essential botero when reaching some significance in the rest of the disciplines.

In its lifting nature we will discover a balanced use of color and reminiscences to the Dutch tradition, but also its origins -in the form of chromatic and volumetric exuberance; They constitute one of its clearest claims that the style can and perhaps should better define an artist than their songs. They are not far in the sample, a technique that did not dominate but in which it developed permanently.

Of their religious production, largely linked to your childhood, you can contemplate Our Lady of Colombia or the portraits of bishops walking through forests of a rich nature. In this case, its source of influence was the quattrocento, but addressed the matter with some freedom (Bishop in the bathroom). Another matter with obvious plastic possibilities that was not alien to him was that of the circus, in which nothing seems excessive and all possible: he embarked on him since 2006, after visiting one in the evocative Mexican city of Zihuatanejo, although he also frequented them as a young man in Medellín. His figures do not appear in action, but static, detaching nostalgia.

After the chapter focused on violence, in which their eyes are not lacking at Guernica and the May 2we will see his watercolors -another technique that always accompanied him, and in which he displayed all his themes; In it he carried out his last series in 2019- and pieces linked to his Colombian roots, which voluntarily always had, enriching them with exaggerated colors and shapes.