Botero draws big, brazen style from classic paintings

This is probably not what you think it is.

"The Baroque World of Fernando Botero," a stunning retrospective of the Latin American artist's work opening at the Fine Arts Museum tonight, is not just about color.

It's not about fat people.

It's not about politics. It's not about creating a new standard of beauty.

And it's not even about religion - at least not in the sense that Botero is taking a stand on Catholicism one way or the other.

No, you can't look at the drawings, the monumental paintings and sculpture in this 100-work exhibition - one of only 13 showings in the U.S. - through the 20th-century aesthetic playbook.

You have to reach back into the history of art to decode this oddly ambivalent work, to the art of the all-but-forgotten history painters and folk craftsmen, the long-dead painters of the powerful and the poor.

And all of it turned on its head by Botero's peculiar lens on the world.

The style

Like every artist in search of a voice, there was a time when Botero wasn't yet Botero.

He was just a kid steeped in the religious art of the churches of Medellin, Colombia, where he was born and raised.

At 18, the boy who'd crafted illustrations for his city newspaper left his widowed mother and conflicted country to travel and to study masters including Goya, Velazquez, Ingres and Delacroix, Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo and Jose Clemente Orozco in museums all over Europe and Mexico.

Only four or five years later, in 1956, his makeshift training came to fruition in a seemingly insignificant sketch of a mandolin, which, in his hands, looked swollen like a watermelon ready to pop.

Even then, he realized this was a seismic moment in his career.

From there, Botero was driven by instinct and purpose, a figurative painter swimming against a strong aesthetic current created by blue chip abstract expressionists such as Jackson Pollock, Willem De Kooning and Mark Rothko.

"Ultimately, he wanted to create a style where you'd automatically know that this is Botero's work," says Tariana Navas-Nieves, curator of the show and of the museum's significant Latin American and Indian collections. "And this is an artist who doesn't see a need to change that style."

For many, style without substance, style unchanged by time and reflection puts Botero on par with tattoo artists and wallpaper designers.

But Botero is a man deeply tied to the imagery, memories and traditions of Latin America, which in itself is often at odds with a colonial view of the world. In a sense, he approaches his work as a folk artist might. A santero carves a statue of St. Jude, say, with no judgment about the saint, only a desire to pay homage to the image and its legacy in his own voice, his own style. And he'll use a similar visual vocabulary to make it again and again and again.

The work

The woman is naked in the El Pomar Gallery. She lay on her stomach with legs bent at the knees, and toes curled and splayed in a flirty come-hither. She is dark and shiny, her face with no expression at all. She holds a cigarette between fingers of her right hand.

And at 4,000 pounds and nearly 12 feet long, "Smoking Woman" (1987) is more than Botero big; she's like a float in a homecoming parade.

You just want to touch her, to hug the cool, hard bronze, to crawl on her back and merge with a surface that looks like expensive chocolate or mink or coming home.

"The other venues have put the three large sculptures outside," says Navas-Nieves of "Smoking Woman" and two other 2,000-pound pieces. "But we have a perfect space for the work here. And inside, we had a chance to emphasize his interest in volume and form."

All around these mammoth sculptures are beautifully rendered paintings, portraits mostly, on a similar scale - most in the ballpark of 7 feet by 6 feet.

As you walk through the three sprawling galleries, it feels much like the Louvre - room upon room of palace-ready paintings by artists including Delacroix, David or Gericault.
Scale aside, Botero's roots in the work of the masters are obvious enough in works such as "After Velazquez" (2005) - which riffs on the Spanish painter's 1656 portrait of the Infanta Margarita - or "Sunflowers" (1977), which transforms van Gogh's famous flowers into a bouquet robust enough to take over the planet.

More than copies, they are tributes reinvented by Botero's personal lens and largely without any sense of the artist's feelings about the subject matter.

"I think it's certainly about him looking at the past, at history and art history," Navas-Nieves says of Botero's work. "It's certainly about memory and the world around him. ... He's sharing his vision with us but not telling us how to feel about it."

His reductive portraits of everyday people are probably the most personal. The bishop. The nun. The bullfighter. The widow. The street musicians. These paintings are reflections of the world of Botero's youth, a world of beauty and turmoil. Like almost all of the paintings and sculptures here, their cherubic faces are completely impassive, even when they're crying, as in "Our Lady of Colombia" (1992) or in "Woman Falling From a Balcony" (1994), in which the subject seems only slightly surprised at the turn of events.

Despite (or maybe because of) the disconnect, there is something that invites you in the scene, something rich buried underneath those faces and stolid bodies, something that levels the field for every player in his deck of archetypes and makes them - and us - pieces in the same cosmic game.

More is better, as the old saw goes, but sometimes less is more - as in his relatively diminutive chalk and pencil drawings, which reveal a completely different side of this enigmatic artist. Only there does Botero allow his subjects a place to be fully human: not only in their more recognizable musculature but in the direct correlation between affect and emotion. People who are scared look and act scared. People who are distraught look and act distraught.

Finally, we can see a vulnerability in these emblems of Latin American life. In careful drawings such as "The Dancer" (2001) or "The Reclining Man" (2002), a whimsy that is at the heart of many of his other works surfaces, but it is restrained by an emblematic style.

Beautiful. Massive. Like the figures themselves.

DETAILS

THE BAROQUE WORLD OF FERNANDO BOTERO

When: Opens 5 to 8 today and runs through Aug. 16
Where: Colorado Springs Fine Arts Museum, 30 W. Dale St.
Admission: Opening $25, free to members, thereafter $15, free to members; 634-5581, csfineartscenter.org