When Seville Fair Then, as the city that looked different, never ceased to be itself, began to be filled with myths, there was a restless man who did not know how to explain that jewel in the history of urban design.
That man was from Bogota, knew half the world, could paint the most delicious, most difficult bodies in the recent history of fat people’s art, and felt unable to synthesize these wonders.
Seville was not a city for Botero at that time. The painter, who died at the age of 91, after years of leaflessness, fear or emptiness, and the fear of death for himself and his loved ones, some of whom left too early. He was a strong and shy man, generally friendly. Even though he only allows half of his face to be seen, with that goatee that looks like part of the portrait of the thick characters in his paintings, like smiling Colombians.
At that time, he was perhaps the most popular, most well-known and even most loved by his rivals, and also by those who did not forgive someone for appearing as he was, that is, an artist. He invented oil because that’s how he viewed people who tend to be obese and are inherently prone to excessive nakedness, because when you gain too much weight, the body gets sick.
He wanted to combat this belief about the disease of fat people; On the contrary, there is health there, and even joy looking in the mirrors of the streets and stores, he said. People must allow different dimensions of their soul to emerge as they wish, including the natural dimensions of different pauses in growth.
People understood the message and many were grateful. However, there were those who wanted to break that aesthetic deck that Botero used to describe his works, which was as exaggerated as the verses that showcased the foods the poets ate. It was at that time, when the figures that made him famous had already been sold on the streets of Madrid and other worlds, that one or more of them invented a fraud that would mark his future forever and drench his present tear duct with sadness. .
I remember when he called me on the phone from the Ritz Hotel to explain this. Something was going on in your business, there were people saying it was full of blood, because it all came down to the terrible skills of Colombian drug traffickers buying up great figures pretending to be art when in reality they are part of a legacy that ends up in the pockets of those who submit to them.
He said it wasn’t true, but then (as now) any lie found its way like a bonfire rocket. He was saddened that this disaster that befell his business and his face occurred in the very city he loved, Madrid.
I can never forget his sadness, just like I can’t forget the pictures of fat women and big men looking at each other with fun in the mirror. This strong, elegant man, always ready to naively explain the great ideas of his projects, looked like a teenager about to be suspended from school.. As he spoke to me in the Plaza de Colón, I felt that the phone call from the Ritz expressed the tears of a weeping man.
Of course, I knew him in great detail when the Expo invited him to write a supplement about Seville through the Marlborough gallery. best seller In the event that made Seville another region, another city, another gate, another joy partly conceived by a man like him, Jacinto PellonIt was better than the salt of the Guadalquivir.
So they offered him to write in this supplement a box of one hundred words, two hundred words, about the vastness, the river and the life of Seville. I feel helpless, I can’t write, what can I do? If only it were his excuse, if it were a confession of helplessness that exists not in his paintings but in the written metaphor they seek from him.
Then the good people of that world-famous gallery, the Botero and Gordillo and Francis Bacon gallery, called me on the phone because it was known that I was a follower, friend and relative of Botero at one point. Can you write? Thus, I became the narrator of Sevilla, with the name and surname of Fernando Botero, for about ten lines. He signed it and I was honored by it, I no longer forget what I wrote.
He was a great artist, a good man full of metaphor and laughter. However, he was a man who was marked by the world, humanity, the disaster to come, and this moment called death, like letters that he could no longer count and did not want to pronounce.