Curator Zoltán Dragon has hit it on the nose by putting Botero?s paraphrases in the place of the kind of work by which they were inspired. Thus figures from paintings created centuries ago by Raffaello, Velasquez, Goya and Rubens become massively heavy, rose-coloured figures wrapped in flesh shaped by Botero?s brush.
This soft, fatty reality, this half-tonne of happiness is in all of Botero?s paintings. His wild colours, which remind one of Henri Rousseau, bloom around the figures that have well overstepped the baroque cult of flesh. Some kind of otherworldly gentleness floods from their small, pig-like eyes, while the way they hold their bodies and move them represents a cross-section of everyday Latin American life.
