Colombian Art Cartel of Inflated Proportions

Fernando Jaramillo is a visual artist who lives and works in Bogota, Colombia. Jaramillo has a very fluid organic style characterized by intense saturated colors. He has done some interesting work with mixed media on photography, oil and acid on metal, oil on wood as well as oils on canvas. His art reflects the ethnically diverse, rich cultural heritage and varied geography of his homeland. Jaramillo is a modern painter representing a distinct rupture from the mind-set of the 40 year ‘‘La Violencia’‘ which claimed the lives of nearly 500,000 Colombians in civil strife.

 

 

Fernando Botero (1932-) is unquestionably the most recognized Colombian artist due in part to the unique aesthetic of his work. Botero’s signature style using exaggerated proportions to create fleshy eroticized figures creates a unique tension between the sacred and profane. The brilliance of Botero’s work lies in his talents for appropriation and reinvention. His approach to figuration maintains a strong allegiance to observed reality despite adapting many of the techniques and forms of abstract expressionism.

Botero’s situational portraiture is both a celebration of life and also a mocking of his subjects role in this world and their assumed importance within conditions of pointlessness, despite the sense of humour  and empathy. The inflated forms are metaphor for the human ego and its preponderant advantage over the Id.The obesity is also a reflection of humankind’s reflex of accumulation and insecurity. These shapes are at once attractive and endearing yet vulgar and gross.

Botero’s narratives are also social commentary against militarism , the morals and manners of the bourgeoisie and the conservative reactionism of the clergy.An example is his recent exhibition on the Iraqi prison ‘‘Abu Ghraib’‘ in 2006. His future direction as a young painter was influenced by the muralism of Diego Rivera and he artistically represents varying socialist ideologies of Rivera, Khalo, Otto Dix, Picasso etc.

 

 

 He continues to carry the faith into post-modernism  as a standard bearer of the old guard, roman

by their own illusions of  communist utopia. Artistically, this fixation has translated into  mixed artistic results which has lead to a more critical examination of his work’s true artistic merit beyond the circumstances and subject matter; to the point where some art experts  have termed his latter day work ”the politics of mediocrity”.