StampCollector

A quiz question for you – whose smile is this?

It might be the most famous smile in history, reworked in a unique and surprising style by Colombia’s most revered artist, Fernando Botero (“the maestro”, as he’s known in these parts).

That’s right, it’s the Mona Lisa, Botero-style.

And, as visitors to the Botero Museum in Bogota can easily see, the artist’s interpretation of the Mona Lisa is faithful to his way of portraying pretty much everything else around him.

For Botero, the world is fat. Fat women, fat men, fat trees, fat houses, fat fruit, fat animals, fat everything. His work has made him renowned and revered around the world. At Colombia’s recent international film festival in Cartagena, a BBC-produced film documenting Sylvester Stallone’s obsession with Botero was proudly shown in the centre of the city.

For a country as war-ravaged as Colombia, it is refreshing to find the nation’s favourite artist is a bizarre and talented obsessive with a taste for the obscure.

Botero’s work is certainly fun to look at and takes no little skill; I’m no critic or art expert but his paintings are equally as difficult to achieve as some of the masterworks by other artists in his collection contained in the museum. His range of skills is impressive, too, from oil painting and sketching to sculpture in stone and bronze.

Evidence of this is dotted all around Colombia, from parks in Bogota to the central plaza in Medellin, Botero’s home town.

In Botero Plaza camera-toting salesmen offer passers-by pictures of themselves next to giant bronze sculptures of distorted people and animals.

Everything in the Bogota museum, from early works depicting generals and noblemen to his extraordinarily prolfic 1990s, when he seemed to paint everything he could see, is depicted in the same signature style.

The artist’s popularity has even spawned a new generation of Fernando Boteros; not artists, admittedly, but children, born 20-30 years ago at the height of his popularity, named in honour of the country’s most famous cultural son.

I met one of them in a bar last weekend; this modern Botero was an aspiring singer and dancer. He assured me it was normal practice in Colombia to name children after famous people; in 20 years’ time, he said, there will be a whole generation of adults named after the current president, Alvaro Uribe, the most popular leader Colombia has had in decades.

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