A dreamlike, fantastic and fairy-tale dimension where the strong echo of nostalgia and of a world that no longer exists or is in the process of dissolution is perceived. Men, animals, vegetation whose strokes and bright colors immediately bring to mind Latin America where everything is truer than the truth, where there is no place for nuances and which rather favors the exuberance of forms and stories.
This is the stylistic figure of Fernando Botero, Colombian origins, famous and popular all over the world for his unmistakable, immediately recognizable pictorial language.
The exhibition, which presents itself as the first major retrospective of Botero's work in Italy, opens in Rome at the Complesso del Vittoriano – Ala Brasini on May 5 under the aegis of the Institute for the history of the Italian Risorgimento, promoted by the to Cultural Growth – Capitoline Superintendency for Cultural Heritage of Rome Capital, with the patronage of the Lazio Region and the Colombian Embassy in Italy.
Organized and co-produced by Gruppo Arthemisia and MondoMostreSkira, it is curated by Rudy Chiappini in close collaboration with the artist.
To welcome the public outside the exhibition, also visible to all passersby, the gigantic bronze sculpture Horse with bridles - weighing over a ton and a half and more than three meters high - which occupies the space in front of it with all its majestic grandeur the Museum recounting the perfect volumetric plasticity of the symbolic forms of the Botero style.
«I strongly believe in volume, in this sensuality that in painting gives pleasure to the eye. A picture is a rhythm of colored volumes where the image takes on the role of pretext». From this statement by the Master it is immediately clear that his art reveals a more complex universe than it may appear at a first and immediate vision of his works which are instead the result of a delicate balance between executive mastery and expressive values. And so in his austere portraits, in the nudes deprived of any malice, in the still lifes, where the concept of abundance is very strong, the sweetness of the forms is perceived equally strongly, just as in his bullfights, in his jugglers a sense of nostalgia and bewilderment that captures the heart of those who observe them.
Emblematic of Boterian poetics are the figures with abundant shapes, especially female, characterized by a redundant and original language that accentuates the volumes and the three-dimensional plasticity. Botero expands the forms because it is also a functional act to make people understand the importance of colour, spread in large flat and uniform backgrounds, without contours and shading.
The protagonists of his paintings are always devoid of recognizable moods, they feel neither joy nor pain. In front of the card players, the circus people, the bishops, the matadors, the female nudes, Botero expresses no judgment. In his paintings the moral and psychological dimension disappears: the people, in all its variety, simply live their daily lives, becoming protagonists of atypical situations in their apparent obviousness. For Botero, painting is an inner necessity, but also a continuous exploration towards the ideal picture that is never reached.
Stateless, yet tied to the culture of his land, Botero anticipated by several decades the current global vision of an art without fences or borders: it can be read and appreciated in any place and at any time, if one appreciates its continuous reference to classicism in an absolutely contemporary vision that includes politics and society in the reflection. His painting is not within a genre, although it expresses itself through figuration, but invents its own and autonomous genre around which the Colombian painter has developed his own poetics in over half a century of career.
