Fernando Botero: using size to subvert expectations

PIPPA CATTERALL explores what Fernando Botero’s exaggerated figures reveal about sex, power and violence

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OPERA GALLERY LONDON’s latest show is the first solo exhibition of the work of the Colombian artist Fernando Botero (1932-2023) in the city since 2015. It presents a range of paintings and sculptures from across the artist’s 70-year career. The earliest works included date from the 1960s. The latest represent the remarkable material he continued to produce right up to his death aged 91 in 2023.

By the time the earliest work on display was painted, a self-portrait of himself aged one, painted when he was in his thirties in 1966, Botero had already developed the characteristic approach to depiction that was to become his hallmark.

Botero in 1992 explained away his distinctive way of playing with scale by saying that “an artist is attracted to certain types of form without knowing why. You adopt a position intuitively; it is only later that you try to rationalise or even justify it.” Botero’s rationalisation was that in 1957, when painting his groundbreaking work Bodegon con Mandolina (Still Life with Mandolin), he realised that changing the proportions of an object altered how it was perceived.

The resulting exaggerations of scale can be seen as humorous or playful. Yet there is much more to Botero’s art than that. Indeed, he developed a style known as “Boterismo” that used ample proportions to emphasise his themes, satirise and criticise, celebrate life and imbue the ordinary with a monumental quality.

After a move to Spain aged 20, Botero honed his craft by copying old masters in the Prado museum in Madrid. His art developed in dialogue with the masterpieces he observed.

Botero’s work frequently references and parodies historic artworks. In the process he also challenges the voyeuristic gaze. In contrast to the lavish settings sometimes used in historic works his voluptuously reclining women, such as Donna Sdraiata (2012), focus attention on the human form and represent womanliness rather than some form of idealised beauty.

Size is used repeatedly by Botero to subvert what we expect to see. He thereby draws our eyes to details that he wishes to emphasise, often the human aspect of the scene. Instead of using figures to give scale and meaning to the landscape, Botero centres them both in his depictions and titles. An example is his Concierto Campestre (Country Concert, 2017), dominated by a monumental courting couple. In a reversal of historic paintings, it is the landscape that is incidental.

To a British eye, the ample flesh of his subjects can seem reminiscent of the art of Beryl Cook, although Botero’s colour scheme is brighter, his pictures less comedic and his subjects more fully drawn. Somehow that colour enlivens his pictures, heightening the disruptive effects of his art on the viewer.

Take Girl with Cat (1989). Again, this responds to a theme often depicted in the past. Yet the monstrous proportions of both subjects are a world away from the Victorian sentimentalising or sexualising of young femininity. A painting we might expect to foreground either is rendered unsettling, while the almost human features of the cat contrast with girl’s and subvert our expectations. It is an arresting image.

So, more literally, is El Arrastre (The Drag, 1984). Ostensibly it depicts the process of dragging a dead bull out at the end of a bullfight. It is a sight Botero, who spent two years training to be a matador in his youth, was very familiar with. Yet it is the massive bull that dominates the painting in a manner reminiscent of historic death scenes of heroes, and not the tiny matador. Meanwhile, the dismounted picadors look less like bullfighters and more like brutal policemen.

Botero here references Francisco Goya’s work on bullfights to – like Goya – comment on human brutality to their fellow men, in this case in the context of the fighting and assassinations in the ongoing drugs war in Colombia that centred on his home city of Medellín.

This exhibition does not include much of Botero’s more political art, such as the Abu Ghraib paintings he angrily produced in response to the atrocities committed there following the 2003 Iraq war.

Yet there is, throughout, a dramatic tension both with historic art and with contemporary politics. Prelados Banandose en un Rio (1968) (Bathing Bishops in a River), for instance, references the contemporary second episcopal conference of Latin America in Medellin, enlivened by the first ever papal visit to South America, by placing some Catholic bishops in a river, some fully submerged by the changes taking place in the church following Vatican II (the birth of liberation theology, which urged the church to become directly involved in the struggles of the poor).

Subverting the conventional image is also central to A Couple (2014). Contrary to what we might expect, it is the woman who stands towering over the seated man. Yet they hold hands, while on the table before them lie a slice of watermelon and two soft fruits, historic symbols of the female body and female sensuality. This is a depiction that foregrounds relationships and humanity, in contrast to the possessions or memento mori that sometimes throng the paintings that Botero is parodying.

Many of these paintings and sculptures are, like their subjects, monumental in scale. One that is not, among the latest work to be included, is Flautista (Flutist, 2023). Here again, disturbing differences in scale are used to make a serious point. The flute is too small and the hands too large. This absurdity satirises the pretensions of civility celebrated in artistic scenes of historic domesticity.

Like all Botero’s work, it is unsettling as well as sensual, playing with expectation of scale to force us to think about life as well as art.

Fernando Botero, in Praise of an Amplified World is at the Opera Gallery, London until December 6. For more information see: operagallery.com Pippa Catterall is Professor of History and Policy, University of WestminsterThis article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. 

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