MYBOTERO

I met Fernando Botero in 2003, in Athens. But let me tell you the whole story.

I had an assignment related to the 2004 Greek Olympics. To complete a photo shoot, I needed a statue by a Greek artist. A friend, an International Art Dealer, Magda Baltoyanni, always represented Fernando Botero, Sophia Vari and many other contemporary artists in the world, invited me to her Studio and introduced me to Sophia Vari.

It was love at first sight.

The following year, in July 2004, with the invaluable contribution of Magda we organized the
Exhibition of Sophia Vari’s monumental statues in Rome, in Piazza della Repubblica. It was a worldly occasion, as well as cultural. Among the many people in Sophia’s company at the event, with the Mayor of Athens as patroness, critics, journalists, and friends, Fernando was an excellent guest by definition. Then again, in May 2006, in Athens Curated by Magda, 150 paintings and 28 statues adorned the city, from the National Gallery to the Megaron Concert Hall, where he gave a crowded Masterclass and 2000 people who attended were enchanted by the Maestro. Fertile artist, his production, his CORPUS, in different periods, counts over 3000 pictorial works, 200 statues, and countless watercolours.

For Botero, painting is a necessity, and an inner urgency.

He was totally devoted to art. Art was for him a moment of happiness and refuge. He lived for art. An endless search, rewarded by absolute stylistic coherence. The formative value was characterised by a religious silence in which he enclosed himself. He did not let anyone in his Ateliers around the world. He painted alone, alone touched and moved the canvases. And he alone prepared, mixed the colours and always cleaned his brushes. Sophia used to joke that, to visit him in his atelier, she had to send a fax requesting an invitation.

Memory of ideas and of the Lesson on May 24, 2006, in Athens, in conversation with John Sillevis.

“My ambition was to be a painter, and only a painter. I started painting at fourteen, and
since then, nothing has ever been able to stop me. I live with a constant hunger for art. I
aspire to explore the fundamental problems of painting. I have never found anything else in
life that gives me as much pleasure.”

However, it was Florence, the city that profoundly shaped his cultural education. Sometimes, he created different versions or series of his own works or was passionate about reinterpreting famous masterpieces. He absorbed the essence of great Italian painting, solid, precise, well structured, through studies of the old masters, in pursuit of the perfect form.

“If I paint a work using the same theme as a famous painter, I am part of the same tradition.”

Roundness, an ideal measure, the sphere. A long journey through the history of art, from 14th- and 15th-century Italian masters, Giotto, Masaccio, Piero della Francesca, to Etruscan, pre-Columbian, Greek art, and popular traditions, Velázquez, Goya, Rubens, Dürer, Mantegna, Giorgione, Caravaggio, Manet, Ingres, Courbet, Bonnard, and Renoir. Botero knows how to dialogue, in equal measure, with the history of art, reinterpreting the classics with an ironic, personal and provocative touch. Often the stylemes are born from mistakes of the artist. In 1956, by painting a still life with a mandolin, he reduced the resonance hole of the instrument, which deformed and stocky, striking him profoundly. This led him to experiment with a new form, volume dilation.

“I don’t paint fat women. I represent volumes, I am interested and attentive to the sensuality of form. No one believes me but it is true, I have remained faithful to my principles. What I paint are volumes, the expansion of volumes”. Its definitive stylistic figure, abundance as positivity, richness wealth, life.”Reality is arid, I prefer to communicate the fullness and meaning behind the expansion of forms, for me an intuitive form. I was satisfied creating full forms, a fat reality. A compositional relationship between the figure and the space it occupies, a non place.”

His ‘isotonic’ paintings, calm, cold, almost ivory, where chiaroscuro is completely absent, are
unmistakable in their storytelling are recognisable in their story. The colours are always soft,
without defined contours mostly spread in flat and uniform surfaces, without contours, without shadows, do not “excavate” the space. The “visual weight” of the painting, integrates soft lines that interweave naturally with a coherent chromatic range, avoiding contrasts, maintaining balance and visual harmony evoking calm and tranquility.

“I am a slave to art. My life is painting.”

He was aware that his language was universal. A continuous discovery from which he never
stopped learning.

“Form is the most important thing because it defines style. I want the painting to end in
calm, with everything finds its place. For me, a painting is finished when nothing can be
moved, when calm reigns. Color is like a gift that the artist gives to the drawing, but the true ideological position of a painter is expressed through the structure of the drawing. That is why form is much more important. Volume is reality.”

Conceptual in scenes and characters, his works are always recognisable, a balance between
executive mastery and expressive values. ‘Popular’ ranged from everyday life to politics, from religion to art history and Latin American culture. The distorted, sensual, and dilated figures, clear and honest in their subjects, contrasted with their unusual dimensions and the space they occupied.

The gazes turned to the void in apparent coldness seem almost unreal. They do not feel joy or pain, lost in the void or cross-eyed, they do not blink, they see without seeing. “Popular gazes” that reached everyone, recognisable in their storytelling. His works are easily legible, but not for this reason naive.

“To be understood by all, one must describe something very local, something very specific, something one knows intimately. I am convinced that I must be ‘parochial,’ deeply and religiously tied to my own reality, to be universal. Art is always a different vision of the same thing”.

The cycle of works, ‘Abu Ghraib’, are a strong testimony, addressing themes of violence and
oppression with the same language as the gift to the Colombian Museum of Antioquia the
canvases dedicated to the Via Crucis offered a solemn narrative. He was a simple person, and it was his simple, immediate painting that reached people. For Botero, painting was an inner necessity.

“I tried to to produce an art of beauty, to discover the elements of perfection. Often, good
pictorial ideas result from the struggle against monotony. Therefore, in my paintings, I hope
that unexpected things happen. I have magnified the idea that art is beauty.”

He was the painter of defects that became merits.

“Beauty in art has nothing to do with beauty in reality. Opinions, on the other hand, are personal. Art is important because when people begin to forget, art reminds them of what happened. Today, people would not remember the tragedy of Guernica if not for Picasso’s painting.”

He was the only contemporary artist whose name and artistic language became synonymous with a movement, Boterismo, after Leonardismo and Caravaggismo. Name omen. In Spanish, ‘botero’ is the artisan who makes ‘borracce’ (flasks).

“It took me fifteen years to create a ‘Botero’ from start to finish, but I persisted with the same idea and the same universe. Learning to paint. The wonderful thing about painting is that no one can decide to know how to paint. Painting, every single day, takes you down new paths and never lets you stop practicing. I claim the importance of drawing as preparation and as a work in its own right, in all sketches and preparatory studies. One cannot think of any great artist without thinking of his ability to draw. I work all day at home, and that’s enough; I lock myself in my laboratory for hours and concentrate on my work. Throughout my career, I have never stopped working, not even for a single day. I love what I do so much that I cannot stay away from it.’

Even his sculpture are equally beloved.

The Botero painter relied with Emotional Chromaticism, in subtraction leaves to the sculptor Botero the black and white suns in the statues. The volume gives way to the monumental. The sacred solitude of the atelier became a convivial space in the foundry.

“Sculpture exhibitions, especially in bronze, are extremely complex. The lost-wax process is particularly challenging. I also find plaster to be a noble, beautiful, and luminous material. Almost every artist first creates their sculptures as plaster models.” Sculpture, are an important and essential part of his Corpus.

The pictorial works, bidimensional, to be perceived it is enough to position oneself frontally and observe them. Those sculptural, tridimensional, oblige the observer to different points, forced the observer to walk around it, for a better and complete understanding.

”I have always wanted to be a sculptor, but to do so, I had to stop painting.”

These sculptural monuments are often installed in public spaces and have an imposing and fascinating presence.

“My extreme passion for form has led me to the need to transform the subjects of my painting into real three-dimensional and tactile volumes”.

The distinctive style clearly emerges, still round and voluminous forms but in bronze, a bold combination of hyperrealism and exaggeration, resulting in unique and iconic works of art. He began sculpting in the mid-seventies with small-format works. His first model was his own hand. Every summer he went to Pietrasanta, in Tuscany, a city with an extraordinary sculptural tradition and where there were seven foundries, and with Sophia they merged.

” My work comes from many things: Etruscan art, pre-Columbian art, popular art. It is a mixture, a kind of cocktail that forms in my mind. But when people look at it, only one name comes to mind: Botero. This is a Botero and no need to add more. It’s my own work. Is uniquely mine”. He has dedicated himself to a plurality of subjects, remaining faithful to his style. “The three-dimensional or volumetric plasticity of form is very important.”

The evolution of his characters into a sculptural sense would therefore seem like a consequential, even a foregone predictable event. But this is not exactly the case. The translation into bronze excludes color, a fundamental element of his pictorial narration. By paying particular attention to volume, it conquers space.

Twenty years later, in Pietrasanta, accompanying them to the check-out of their trip, with Magda, we thought about bringing them back to Rome with a Diffuse Exhibition, this time featuring Fernando Botero. It was an arduous experience for me, not being a professional in the field. We shared the project with Lorenzo Zichichi, and he, together with the Cigno Arte Group, magnificently brought it to life. Eight monumental works, spread along the axis of Via del Corso in Rome, make art accessible and integrated into everyday life. The urban landscape becomes an open-air gallery, a dialogue between form, space and the viewer.

With his statues, he broke the golden rule of Museums: “Do not touch.” Instead, he always asked people to touch his sculptures. The statues in Rome breathed. Outdoor statues have their own unique way of inviting contact and fostering an imaginary dialogue. It is as if time, light, and even the passing of seasons could animate these works, as the interaction with art can change depending on the context, gifting them a silent voice. I imagined that they could speak to him, have the ability to communicate. The depth of the creative process and the lasting impact of art adds an emotional dimension to the relationship.

“Every time someone pauses to contemplate one of my statues, I know my message is alive. Seeing that it can evoke emotions, reflections, and smiles is the greatest satisfaction for an artist. By definition, statues live infinite lives and carry forward my vision; they celebrate life and beauty in their full static nature and endless expression.”

The imaginary conversations between the statues speak of serenity and beauty, inviting those who observe them to reflect and find a moment of peace.

Reclining Woman: Cat: “Ah, my dear Cat, how wonderful it is to lie here under the sun. From the Pincio Terrace, I can see all of Rome. Do you also feel how the warmth envelops us and gives us a sense of peace? How do you spend your days?

Cat: “My dear, my days are a series of slow strolls, curious glances, and moments of rest between the shadows and rays of the sun. Every day, I feel part of a living painting.”

Reclining Woman: “Oh, my dear friend, people stop, take pictures of us, touch me, caress me. My proud posture is here to remind everyone that every form has its grace. Who knows what thoughts pass through people’s minds when they look at us? And in this silent dialogue with the world, we find our true essence. Perhaps that is the magic of art: capturing the essence of life in an eternal moment. I find peace in knowing that our forms are appreciated and loved. I see wonder and curiosity in people’s eyes, and it gives me energy. They find something of themselves in our serene expressions and our powerful bodies. And so, with them, even though we don’t move, we convey a sense of life and joy to those who observe us.”

Cat: “Your tranquility is contagious, my dear. People look at us and wonder what secrets we hold. Even though we are made of cold materials, our artistic spirit warms the hearts of those who pause to contemplate us. Let us continue to enjoy this moment, in silence, but aware of how fortunate we are to live through art and the eyes of those who look at us, here under the Roman sky still, but in constant motion, we seem like two figures from an eternal story.”

…and between the sculptor and one of his statues?

Statue: “Maestro, I feel honored to have been molded by your hands. My generous form captures attention and evokes smiles. You have given us the power to make people reflect on the beauty that resides in every form, regardless of conventional standards.”

Botero: “Dear friend, you represent my vision of abundance and beauty. I wanted you to embody the joy of living and the beauty of profuseness. You were born from a desire to break traditional norms and celebrate the diversity of forms. Do you see people appreciating this message? How do you feel now that you are here in Rome, exposed to the curious gazes of admirers?”

Statue: “I will continue to convey your vision, Maestro, here in the sacred heart of Rome. If I may, I have a curiosity. When you brought me to life with your skillful hands, what did you feel? What were your thoughts and emotions as you shaped me from cold stones and bronze?”

Botero: “I was happy. My dear friend, creating you was a journey of discovery and emotion. Art is a universal language, and through you, I can communicate.”

Statue: “Now that I am here, amidst the streets and squares, I watch the people who gaze at me with wonder and sometimes with a smile. I wonder, Master, are you satisfied with how I convey your message?”

Botero: “An obsession for an element is what creates a distinct style. In art, it is very important to create something that is immediately recognisable, even by a small detail. Every chisel strike, every curve of your figure, was an act of love.”

Botero: “We share the same determination.

Our wounds, our pain, our courage have never been enough to escape the destiny that awaits us. But in our suffering, there is also our strength and our honour We have fought, suffered, but we have also lived every moment intensely. We can find peace in knowing that our spirit lives through those who observe us. Our stories make us brothers in this eternal battle. They inspire and evoke respect and admiration in those who pause before us. In this, we will find our immortality and look to the future with ‘fresh’ eyes.“

Goodbye, Botero… Thank you, Maestro.
I will always carry your spirit and your message with me.