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 Vallarta Living | Art Talk | June 2005 
Botero's Anger at Abu Ghraib on Display in Rome
 Shasta Darlington - Reuters
Rome - Bloodied hoods and anguished prisoners strung up naked by their feet or forced into sexual poses are hardly the images one expects from Fernando Botero, an artist who has made jovial, rotund portraits his trademark.
But that's what visitors to an exhibition that opened in Rome on Thursday will find.
Tucked in between paintings of the corpulent cardinals, presidents and prostitutes of Botero's native Colombia is a room filled with "the horrors of Abu Ghraib", a series that is on display for the first time.
Latin America's best-known living artist broke with tradition last year after reading an article about U.S. soldiers' abuse of prisoners at Iraq's Abu Ghraib jail.
"There are a lot of things that hit me, but the torture at Abu Ghraib is something different," the 73-year-old painter and sculptor said at a press conference to inaugurate the show.
"I didn't expect it, like most people, like the majority of Americans, this conduct from a so-called civilised country."
Botero, who was aboard a plane when he read the report, was so enraged, he grabbed a piece of paper and started the sketches that served as the basis for the new series.
Since October, he has produced more than 60 works, including 20 oil paintings, on the topic. Some 45 of those are on display at Rome's Palazzo Venezia, a venue usually reserved for Italian artists who have long since died.
"It's a great honour, a consecration of Botero," said Riccarda Contini, a gallery owner who helped to organise the show.
In one painting, a prisoner stripped from the waist down dangles from the ceiling of his dark cell. In another muscle-bound men dressed in women's lingerie are forced to lie on top of each other.
Instead of the pastel churches and tropical trees, these grim paintings are coloured by sprays of red blood, purple hoods and blue plastic gloves worn by prison guards.
Ahead of the opening, Botero told Reuters he hoped his works would be a "permanent witness to a great crime" in much the same way Picasso's "Guernica" has become a permanent reminder of the tragedies of the Spanish Civil War.
"The first thing I had to do was get it out of my heart, but art has this capacity to keep on accusing and I hope that will be the impact in the long term," he said.
The exhibition is being held in 15th century palazzo that housed fascist dictator Benito Mussolini's office. He gave his public speeches from the balcony.
The retrospective includes more than 200 paintings, sketches and sculptures by Botero and will be on display through Sept. 23. The Abu Ghraib series will then head to Germany and Greece. |
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