At the age of 87 years, Fernando Botero is the artist living the most celebrated in the world. Shy and reserved, he always remained faithful to his style “extra-large”. His portraits and his sculptures are known everywhere, and the huge exhibitions of his works, over a hundred in 40 Countries, count millions of visitors. To tell his life and his art comes to the movies Botero – Search without end , the documentary directed by canadian Don Millar, in the dining room from 20 to 22 January with Feltrinelli Real Cinema and Wanted the Cinema. A unique opportunity to retrace the origins and developments of the paintings and of the sculptures explained by the same ingenious and controversial colombian artist.
Botero, the artist of the monumental in the doc ‘A search without end’
An intimate portrait and the deep begins in a restaurant in Aix-en-Provence with Botero surrounded by his three children, Lina, Fernando and Juan Carlos, who tells stories of his childhood, to Medellin, starting with the tragic death of his father when he was four years old. Then the first drawings sold for a few pesos with which to pay for the trip to Madrid, where he discovered the masterpieces of Velazquez and Goya, shock and looking at a book, a painting by Piero della Francesca, and the ride the Vespa up to Florence to study Italian Renaissance art. “There I found the painting that I liked,” says Botero, “and the theory of someone who was gifted with a great knowledge”.
the money ran out, be back in Colombia where he teaches at the university of the Andes. There he came to know and marries a student, Gloria Zea, together in Mexico, and from that moment on, his paintings are full of colours. “An art to be universal, must be local,” explains the artist. In the 60’s and comes to New York with two hundred dollars in his pocket, a difficult period. “There was the dictatorship of abstract art,” recalls Botero, “nobody wanted to touch me as if I was a leper because I was in figurative art”. Her first show received critical devastating but it does not change the idea, and shortly after the shot of the scene: two of his paintings are purchased and exhibited at the Moma. “Everything in life should be so. If I had not been there, would not have happened”.
