Headline July 5th, 2012 / The 'Hero-Picasso' of South America!

"The 'Hero-Picasso' of South America!"

The initial public reaction in America ranged from muted to hostile. Lionel Shriver dubbed them 'a ghastly mistake,' then ''Abu Ghraib'' has at last put him on terms with the critical community historically resistant to his work.

Now his figures, though in his case firmly sized up rather than teetering on ruin, are compared favourably to Bacon's, while others have likened the impact of his Abu Ghraib paintings, --now in the hands of the University of Southern California at Berkley following the artists donation of the entire collection -''I don't believe in making money from the suffering of these people''- to that of his hero Picasso's ''Guernica'' -itself an assault on our indifference to modern warfare's savagery towards collateral targets. 

This icon -Fernando Botero- has proved has provoked critics with his huge and hugely popular- Pieces for six decades. But now, with appreciation replacing approbrium following the Colombian's Abu Ghraib series, and then it dawned on the world to reconsider his XXXL artwork.

So the beauty and grace now is, to review and make amends for the enduring controversy and delight in his endearing canvases and his own equally colourful life. Exactly how threatening he became to the dead conscience of the world, became apparent only a couple of years ago when the artist unveiled a series of paintings depicting the abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib, inspired by Seymore Hersh's account of the scandal in the New Yorker. 

First exhibited at the Palazzo Venezia in Rome in 2005 and later at the Marlborough Gallery New York, the series caused a furore, a great and unending furore, not just being the first significant artistic response to the Bush Administration's conduct of the war in Iraq, and that too by a Colombian living in the land of the ''surrender monkey'' at that, but for showing the victims not as the heavy pixielated. 

Semi emaciated individuals of the news bulletin, but as beautiful ''Homo Boteros'', their fleshy faces transfigured into vehicles of pain rather than plenty, and whose frames express the volubility of life- and by extension implicate those who wish to diminish it. 

And Botero remembers, ''when I read Hersh's article, I was very angry but it took four, five, six months before i decided I'd do something. Then I started reading other articles, did some drawings and thats how I got to do something like 80 paintings''. 

What strikes the viewer, after their corpulence, is that none of the subjects in the 50 paintings so far exhibited new representations of the ''trophy shots'' that formed the basis of original outcry and subsequent trials. Said Boteros, '' for me it would limit my imagination I would feel trapped in that reality. 

I prefer to create reality that doesn't exist.'' And as with some of his earlier work that commented on state approved violence in his native Colombia and its pathetic serial inflicter of pain by excluding all but the canine culprits of Abu Ghraib, Botero chooses to humanise the victims rather than simply demonise their tormentors! 

So with thanks to !WOW! For this painful but brilliant research, Good Night And God Bless!

SAM Daily Times - The Voice Of The Voiceless