In both groups, the features are emphasized just enough to recall their origins in the reaches of “Botería”. Masks and lies? In truth, we suspect that these hermetically sealed bronze surfaces conceal a pandemonium of reverie and profound images. Profound and imprecise. Imprecise because they are profound. Perhaps archetypes, as defined by C.G Jung: “elements of the unconscious which constantly vary and which each time need to be re-interpreted.” Sculptures like the two Reclining women further strengthen this impression. But hoe can it be expressed without lapsing into psychologism which can only be reductive since we are dealing with artistic creation, that is, matters of exception and complexity? Baudelaire can undoubtedly help us here, Baudelaire who remains a unique yardstick for all art which has won the freedom of inventing the visible. In his poem The Giantess, he makes this very strange confession: When Nature impassioned by her powerful spirit Each day conceived children in the guise of monsters, I would have wished to live with a young giantess (…) To explore at leisure her magnificent forms, To slither along the slopes of her enormous knees (…) To sleep nonchalantly under the shadow of her breasts. Baudelaire’s dream, if it has any universal value—which would not be too difficult to confirm in mytho-psychology—provides precious indication which inevitably takes us back to the distant fantasies of childhood. And it is not Botero’s sculpture, with the lavish care and overwhelming force of its monumentality modeled by someone who is a perfect master of his art, a means of bringing these fantasies back to the present? There is a paradise lost, that of childhood, in the gigantic proportions and expansion of these human forms. Such exceptional treatment and these shocking anatomical transgressions which are its result owe their inner necessity to such an impulse, long before the artist senses any plastic need to express it.
Right: Lovers, 2010; White Marble
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Fernando Botero