Botero in Singapore: Review

by Carmen Nge
Pictures by Angelia Poon


Full-figured and fleshy, plump women have finally found a worthy lover of their curvaceous, sensuous volume. His name is Fernando Botero.

In Singapore, a city that celebrates model-thin females in bone-hugging clothing, the gleaming bronze Botero women sunning themselves in nude splendour all along the Esplanade harken back to a time when ample girth symbolized health, wealth and beauty. These are women who scoff at their anorexic-looking sisterly counterparts from the island city; these are women who are more confident about their naked roundedness than the waifs who stiletto down Orchard Road in their ubiquitous spaghetti-strap tops, swinging their bonded, coloured hair.

There is a certain something about these monumental bronze sculptures that invite scrutiny—perhaps it is their unabashed state of undress, perhaps it is their mammoth size, perhaps it is their aura of whimsy. Perhaps it is all of the above contextualized within a national space that is entirely opposite: small, serious, sedate Singapore.

Although signage warned the public to stay away from the sculptures, children delighted in trying to clamber up Botero’s cherubic Horse (1999) and tickling the soles of the Man on a Horse’s (1999) feet. Adults giggled as they posed next to gloriously nude Adam and Eve (2003); one man even tried to touch Adam’s bronze privates but it was a little beyond his reach! It’s not often one observes this much playful engagement with public art, beyond the usual snapshot moment.

If, as Botero says, his monumental sculptures are designed to bring art to the people, to engage them, then his largest solo exhibition in Asia has certainly achieved its purpose.

Twenty of his public sculptures are scattered throughout Singapore but the majority of them—16 to be exact—are located along the Esplanade, set against a panoramic skyline of brilliant blue sky, gently undulating waves and man-made concrete and metallic structures.

Their location befits them: graceful, well-rounded women stretch out on their bellies and backs, soaking in and beautifully reflecting the bright shafts of sunlight that dance on their ample bosoms and twinkle off of their bountiful bubble behinds. These are women who enjoy their own presence, wrapped up in their own private joys—Reclining Woman (1993) with her eyes half-closed is sluggish in the noonday heat as flies flit between her armpit and abdomen; Woman with Cigarette (1987) has a crusty air about her, and a decidedly coiffed hairdo, but she is cool and nonchalant despite the fallen leaves and twigs nestled between her thunder thighs and the stones lodged between the bend in her knees.

Reclining Woman (2003) is Mother Nature personified. Set in the middle of a grassy clearing and against a magnificent, majestic heritage tree (these are very old trees that are protected from damage and demolition by the state due to their historical status) this bronze bucolic beauty has her face turned up towards the sun and a blanket loosely draped in front of her. Although Botero insists his monumental sculptures are not site specific, the verdant green locale seems made for her plenitude. The solidly smooth sculpture reflects the dappled vista in a manner that pleases the eye, and its size—though large in a more enclosed space—is perfectly proportionate to the massive tree that provides her ample leafy shade.

Alternatively, Woman with Fruit (1996), which is placed along the waterfront, appears almost mermaid-like in her pose. Sunbathing al fresco, her gaze is out to sea and the fruit in her hand almost like an offering to Poseidon, God of the sea. Her hair is as perfectly wavy as the salty water, its undulating shape mirroring the seascape but also suggesting a serpentine creature and the fruit, its Garden of Eden-like temptation. Her legs are crossed in a whimsical pose, almost playful, although her face is curiously serious, even enigmatic.

These are Botero’s women—resplendent, redolent, rewarding their viewer with more than just their ample hips and firm breasts. These are women who invite us to forget their femaleness (for their sex is never evident, lost between their massive thighs), to forget their nudity because what engages the senses is the quality of their materiality, their capaciousness. From shiny blue black to warm glowing brown with slightly golden-veined undertones, the bronze used by the artist has a character and a life of its own. Just like his women.

Botero’s celebration of the fecund female figure does not only exist in the open air and the realm of public art but also within the more traditional gallery space. Some 70 paintings and 14 small sculptures are currently on exhibit at the Singapore Art Museum, showcasing a range of Botero’s work, from the 1970s right up to our present decade. It is here that we see what makes Botero unique, what makes a gallery viewer gush to this writer: “I love his paintings because they are like nothing I have ever seen before.”

Carlos Fuentes, one of Latin America’s most prominent men of letters, argues that “Botero’s women are not fat. They are space.” However, Botero’s paintings capture a sense of space in a way that is different from how his sculptures occupy volume. In their three dimensionality, his monumental sculptures are synonyms for depth—their skeletal insides radiate outwards to extend space while their clay mold and bronze skin covets this space into a specific shape. Alternatively, his paintings, in their two-dimensionality, are more confined by the planar form; since they cannot extend in every direction, their suggestion of space has to come from within the frame.

What is unique about Botero’s paintings is they do not adopt a Renaissance sense of perspective. His figures are flat; his still life is gargantuan but not in relation to their surroundings—his Pear (1976) is enormous not because the table it sits on is small. The fruit is large because the vividness of its golden-brown colour and its centrality on canvas make it so. It is huge because it fills the frame. Additionally, it is immense because the teeth mark on its smooth skin is so tiny. Hence, we recognize something is large not in relation to its surroundings, but in relation to itself. What is important, the artist seems to imply, is not how the objects in a painting occupy space but how they themselves embody space.

This notion of space has become universal in Botero’s work, even though he takes great pains to imbue his work with a Colombian flavour and context as well, as seen in his bullfighting series—Picador (1987) and The Death of Ramon Torres (1986)—and works like The Seamstresses (2000), which captures the multi-racial working class women in his home country.

In his earlier paintings, for example The English Ambassador (1987), The President and The First Lady (diptiques) (1989), the girth and fatness of the people do not only connote space, they also imply over-abundance and ostentatious-ness. Paintings of corpulent, over-dressed Presidents and their wives are a reflection of the state and its leaders, who, in their pomp and pretentiousness, live in a wholly different economic reality from their fellow citizens.

As his work develops, the relationship between size and corruption, largesse and excess, becomes more muted. The selected works on display at the Singapore Art Museum are more focused on Botero’s relationship to European masters like Ingres, Titian and Van Gogh. Even when he is mimicking Piero della Francesca’s Duke and Duchess of Urbinn in After Piero della Francesca (1998), or honing in on the infant from Diego Velasquez’s Las Meninas and reproducing her in rotund form, in After Velasquez (2000), Botero simultaneously charts his own course even as he pays respects to a glorified tradition. For the visitors to the museum, this is a chance to see the masters up close, through the eyes of a more contemporary student of these art history giants.

What is sorely missing from Botero in Singapore is, most assuredly, his series of work in response to the violence in his hometown of Medellin. The city that most people associate with drug cartels, state corruption and poverty has, since 1999, become the subject of Botero’s paintings and sketches but none of these work are on display in Singapore. They give us a glimpse of a different kind of Botero, a different appreciation for space in a context that is not about pleasure and plenitude but pain and death.

Botero in Singapore has been lauded as “the most comprehensive survey exhibition in Asia” of the artist’s work but without this recent series on Medellin, we are left with an impression of an artist who lives in a state of nostalgia for his native Colombia, during a time when beautiful large women languished in their own amplitude, amidst a verdant, rustic landscape of serenity.

Perhaps that is the exhibition’s intention—to cocoon us from the world’s depressing realities with art that reminds us how pleasure and the imaginative spirit need never decay.

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This review appears in Off The Edge, January 2005 issue.