FERNANDO BOTERO — L'ARTISTA

Fernando Botero Angulo was born on April 19, 1932 in Medellín, a city in the Colombian Andes.
Son of a commercial representative and destined to become a bullfighter, during his studies at the high school and then at the Institute of Fine Arts of Medellín, he expresses his passion for drawing by painting watercolors that mainly use bulls and bullfighting. At the age of 16 he exhibited his works for the first time and collaborated with the newspaper "El Colombiano", drawing the illustrations for the Sunday supplements. Fascinated by the cultural environment of the capital Bogotá, Fernando Botero moved there and joined the Mexican muralist school led by Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Sigueiros and Josè Clemente Orozco, whose influence in the watercolor "Donna che crège" 1949.
In 1952 Fernando Botero won the second prize at the Salon of the artists of Bogotà and, with the winning money, he went to Europe to admire the works of Francisco Goya and Tiziano Vecellio at the Museo del Prado where, for a while, he worked as a copyist, while attending the Royal Academy of San Fernando. During the trip he goes to Paris and stops in Italy, where he comes into contact with the major works of the Italian Renaissance, especially Giotto and Andrea Mantegna who inspire him so much to reproduce several copies of their masterpieces, while not disdaining the other authors of the Sienese school, and of Tuscany, in general. In 1955 he returned to Colombia while the French avant-garde was in fashion, which strongly differs from his style. Embittered, he moves to Mexico, with his newly married wife, and experiments, for the first time on the canvas, that dilation of the forms that will become his characteristic trait.

According to Botero, painting must be understood as an inner necessity, a need that leads to an uninterrupted exploration of the ideal framework; however, this need remains largely unfulfilled. The color remains soft, never exalted, never feverish, generally spread in flat and uniform backgrounds, without contours. Note the total absence of shadows in his paintings, because they, according to Botero "would dirty the idea of ​​the color that I wish to transmit".