Beware of painting so easily recognized, of those surprising but rapidly familiar figures, of the unlikely and peaceful universe that naive enthusiasts think can be taken in at a glance. Things are not as simple as they look. Indeed, nothing is simple in Botero's work, least of all his play on appearances.

This is painting that tends to disconcert, offering up as it does colors, and obvious or very simple forms, that are not what we expected. Often, our gaze turns away from the obvious, when the obvious is there to throw it into confusion.

Take a better look!

This is painting that not only comes from afar but leads afar, beyond the mirror; an art born of patience and passion, of a long journey through time and space, across an imaginary world peopled with glorious ghosts of the past, and enriched by myriad encounters. A world that mixes pell-mell the artist's strong memories of his youth in Latin America, the still vivid traces of Pre-Colombian art, his discovery of modern European art and his deeply moving encounter with the Italian Renaissance Masters, followed by the shock of the New York avant-gardism of the sixties and America's teeming artistic milieu. Painting, then, that is the fruit of a lifetime devoted entirely to being a painter, to developing a singular oeuvre rooted in reality, but haunted by a masterfully reined spirit of the bizarre. Painting that ranks among today's very best.

In the words of Marc Fumaroli : "Through the cunning magic of his brush, dwarfs become giants, cats become tigers, girls become whales. But the giants have dwarfs' heads, the tigers have cats' paws, and the whales the lips of little girls. A universe of the unlikely, that comes across so clearly and faithfully in rhetoric, in fables and tales, in short, in childhood."(1)

Nowadays, to represent something commonly means to furnish the visible aspect of it. To Botero, on the contrary, it means to diverge from an object's aspect, to describe a detour around it beyond similarity and designation; that is, to enter into the paradoxical realm of ambiguity and dissimilarity. Botero's painting targets presence more than representation; it is intended to advance towards the eye, which it seeks to perturb, to move.

Fernando Botero was born 'into a family of modest means in Medelín, in the department of Antioquia, Colombia, on 19 April 1932. His father a travelling salesman, crisscrossed the region's rugged paths on donkeyback; he would die of a sudden heart attack when Fernando was aged only two. This would leave the son with a faceless absence, a far-off image of sadness and bereavement in company of his mother and two brothers.

Famous today for its drug dealers, Medelín of former times was but a provincial little town hemmed in by the surrounding mountains. Life here was on the straight and narrow, in the long shadow of the Church. The young Fernando attended a secondary school run by Jesuits, who imposed strict discipline. Out of boredom, Fernando began drawing a lot and, in the natural course of events, then went on to painting. He took great interest in bullfights which, at the age of thirteen, became his first source of artistic inspiration. Soon he turned into an ardent aficionado, whose enthusiasm would last a lifetime. Indeed, when famous, he would spend two years painting almost nothing but bullfights. At this early age, however, he was happy to sell his watercolors of bullfights at five pesos a piece, by the arena entrance gates.