UNTIL SUNDAY 3/9
F. BANCAJA. Pl. Tetouan, 23
The Bancaja Foundation managed to gather the work of Jaume Plensa in its headquarters in Plaza Tetuán during the Fallas, Joan Genovés and Fernando Botero with their eye on the tourists who crowd the city. A very planned achievement that speaks well of this institution that has been bringing great names of national and international art for years.. What concerns us here is Botero, the best-known Latin American artist in the world who has come ready to display his first retrospective in Valencia with more than forty works, many of them never seen before here, like his excellent watercolors 2022. The Colombian has given his name to a very marked aesthetic (and constant), the boterista, characterized by the exaltation of volume, the opulence of shapes and the explosion of color. It is said that he has become a brand, which means that recognizing his works is very easy: arrangement of differentiated plans, clear drawing with defined shapes, monumental figures in the foreground that occupy the entire canvas, quiet and expressionless, taste for the gigantic and disproportionate and games with perspective and planes. Deforms, twists, invest and give volume (ojo, He says he doesn't look fat) with soft shapes and friendly tones. That the figures are exaggeratedly voluminous? Botero. That the rider is bigger than the horse? Botero. By Fernando Botero. Sensuality and melancholy Initiatory still lifes of unreal colors from the sixties parade, still lifes, carnival scenes, circus and dance, paintings plein air and female portraits that are the ones that have most subjugated an artist who this April will celebrate his 91 years. and active. He has drawn on great masters of the history of Western art such as Piero della Francesca (his duke of Urbino) and Diego Velázquez (its glazes) and has practiced painting, drawing and sculpture without complexes, like Pablo Picasso, the one who said that it took four years to paint like Raphael but a lifetime to paint like a child. Botero would say that it is very difficult to deform if you do not know how to form. S.M.
