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Lot Essay
Still life is an important genre in the work of Fernando Botero. Indeed it was this genre with which the artist first began to use his inflated forms, around 1956 when he was working in Mexico. A key work, Still life with Mandolin, was the origin of his experimentation with size, form and proportion. Where the larger sound hole of the mandolin should have been, the artist first placed a small dot, which immediately made the instrument look oversized. He began to play with sizes of objects in relation to one another as well as with the proportions of objects themselves.
In Naturaleza muerta con sandía y naranjas, Botero acknowledges the influence of classical Dutch still-lifes. The placement of the objects and the inclusion of elements such as string, the paired sets of seeds, the propped up fork, and the partially peeled or exposed fruits all recall the baroque sensibilities of this historic genre and Botero's own affinity with its expressions. Here the artist offers us a view from above the table, so that we may see the surface that includes the rumpled fabric of a tablecloth, a large slice of watermelon fairly bursting with juice, hefty oranges and very miniscule green apples.
The most interesting element is perhaps the fabric which is being used to prop the fruit up so that it remains in place while the painter works. Beyond still life, the work makes a direct reference to the act of painting as a process that involves various strategies for making an image. In this case, the artist works to produce a version of reality that evokes a number of questions. The fabric makes us understand that the artist creates an artificial presentation for reproduction in a painting. This relationship between the real and the artificial is raised again with the inclusion of the fly. While the representation of a fly in motion in real time is a physical impossibility, the artist places it at the top of the picture plane, overturning notions of time, space and reality. The work, seeming to be about a simple grouping of fruit, becomes instead a series of questions about the viewer's relationship to what is presented, the degree of reality to be interpreted and the connections between time, object, and humanity.
Rocío Aranda-Alvarado, curator, El Museo del Barrio, New York
In Naturaleza muerta con sandía y naranjas, Botero acknowledges the influence of classical Dutch still-lifes. The placement of the objects and the inclusion of elements such as string, the paired sets of seeds, the propped up fork, and the partially peeled or exposed fruits all recall the baroque sensibilities of this historic genre and Botero's own affinity with its expressions. Here the artist offers us a view from above the table, so that we may see the surface that includes the rumpled fabric of a tablecloth, a large slice of watermelon fairly bursting with juice, hefty oranges and very miniscule green apples.
The most interesting element is perhaps the fabric which is being used to prop the fruit up so that it remains in place while the painter works. Beyond still life, the work makes a direct reference to the act of painting as a process that involves various strategies for making an image. In this case, the artist works to produce a version of reality that evokes a number of questions. The fabric makes us understand that the artist creates an artificial presentation for reproduction in a painting. This relationship between the real and the artificial is raised again with the inclusion of the fly. While the representation of a fly in motion in real time is a physical impossibility, the artist places it at the top of the picture plane, overturning notions of time, space and reality. The work, seeming to be about a simple grouping of fruit, becomes instead a series of questions about the viewer's relationship to what is presented, the degree of reality to be interpreted and the connections between time, object, and humanity.
Rocío Aranda-Alvarado, curator, El Museo del Barrio, New York