The dark, dark world of Fernando Botero

Fernando Botero is known for his bright colours, his humour and above all his inflated view of everything he sees. From women to pigeons, all his living objects are solid, practically three dimensional on his canvasses and multifaceted in his sculptures. It seems as if this South American artist sees things through a special lens, through which sheer voluptuous voluminousness cannot be reduced despite the advent of the Atkins' diet.

We are all familiar with his ladies in mantillas, sometimes dressed and sometimes not, and his matadors in impossibly tight pants fighting bulls that come from another era. He has been practically dismissed as an artist whose PR machine stamped him indelibly as a painter of jolly scenes; situations that bring smiles to our faces as these absurdly fat people dance and cavort in multicoloured playfulness.

Since 1994 Botero, whose family is directly involved in Colombian politics, has been scathing with the drug baron situation in his home country in the only way he knows how. Gone are the frilly skirts and the fans. Gone are the tricorns of the priests sporting black umbrellas. We now have blood, gut and bullets. The fat men are still fat men but beware of anyone repeating Caesar's wish to have fat men around him, these fatties are vicious and deadly.

Botero has now gone one step further: A series of 95 paintings showing the Abu Ghraib atrocities in an exhibition entitled Abu Ghraib-El Circo in Casa das Artes de Vigo in Spain. This is sheer Goya. Botero has gone the way of the great master. Both Goya and Botero in their own particular idiom have transmogrified their styles to be hypercritical of the world around them. If Goya had the Inquisition in his day Botero has the Establishment which in its own way will fight tooth and claw to preserve the oligarchic status quo. To a certain extent, traditionalist domination still exists even in this tiny island where everyone is either related to or knows everyone else. Yet the world is changing and fast as we have just seen in America where once again the ultimate prize, the presidency, has been snatched from the jaws of the Martha's Vineyard lot once again and power is being wielded by a man who came from nowhere at all.

The war in Iraq has been an escalating disaster. Now that America has a new President and one who promises to reconcile the various factions that are renting the world apart, maybe this exhibition is brilliantly timed to coincide with the inevitable planning period Barack Obama needs to take decisions that have far-reaching effects on us all. Despite all this the art world has not seen fit to pass comment on what is going on in the world around it. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of installations of all kinds that can do that and cause sensation but actual traditional canvases are a rarity. The reason is simple. While installations are rarely sold on a commercial basis, normally executed oils and watercolours eventually end up in some private collection for the greater delectation of the owner. Most people would rather not see a canvas of a fat naked man wearing a blindfold being urinated upon, would they? That would be taking us right out of our comfort zone, wouldn't it? Only the greatest living and best selling artist in the world can pull an exhibition like this off.

Botero's depictions of the horrors of Abu Ghraib are rendered ever more terrible because the allied forces were depicted as knights sans peur et sans reproche; Parsifals and Galahads that were there to liberate the Iraqis from the evil forces of Saddam Hussein and extreme Islam. Handsome knights who wore flowers in their hair and all that tommyrot till one fine day we found out that the forces of evil had indeed played havoc with the psyches of the gaolers at Abu Ghraib who enjoyed themselves hugely inventing new tortures for the detainees. This is what Botero is depicting.

The object of this acidic social comment is to drive home the fact that the capability of man's cruelty to man did not stop with the Holocaust. Since World War II there have been countless instances of systematic torture and genocide in the world and we really do not need a "monument to the murdered Jews" the size of two football pitches in Berlin just off the Unter den Linden to remind us of what terrible depths of depravity man is capable. Even the good guys can get it wrong as we have learned to our utter disgust at Abu Ghraib.

It was suggested that Botero's latest work is comparable to Picasso's Guernica; a cubist depiction of the horrendous bombing of a little town in Spain that would have been forgotten had not Picasso decided not to tell the world about it in the most original manner of the time. The Botero series involves us in a close experience of suffering; the pain of others seldom feels so close and the shame of its perpetrators so obvious.

kzt@onvol.net