The name “Gold Museum” is somewhat misleading: the renowned institution located in the heart of Colombia's capital is actually an anthropology museum. Upon entering the modernist 1960s building in the heart of Bogotá, the video explaining the technique of turning metal into a sheet so that it can be hammered, introduces you to the marvelous (and wonder-bearing) world of goldsmithry of pre-Columbian people, where metals, and gold in particular, symbolize the fertilizing power of the sun.
But the initiation takes place in a dark gallery where jewelry and minuscule figurines glimmer, while sounds of birds transport you to some South American forest. The shaman is a channel between heaven and earth, as well as between humans and animals. The golden exhibits, objects of worship or artifacts depicting shamans, lead us into discovering the societies in which those sacred creatures played a central part and show us the path to a more spiritual and holistic view of life (and death).
Proceeding to the “Cosmology and Symbolism” gallery, the metallic little frogs move the spectator in the magical way the honest depiction of animals and plants by humans who lived centuries ago, in another continent, can always prove moving.
The dazzling, smooth containers with the perfect curves evoke Brancusi, whereas masks suspended in black display cases are positioned like a sparkling Greek drama Chorus comprised of acephalous Agamemnons. Beyond the vizards on golden sheets, more eyes, holes in geometrical breastplates or tiny eyes in anthropo-zoomorphic chubby ceramic vases with small hands or wings are looking at us.
But where have I seen similar faces staring at me so intensely from another world? Oh, but of course, nearby, just the other day, at the Botero Museum!
The dancer with the little mustache, tightly embracing his partner (though both overweight, like the rest of the couples in the ballroom, they seem to levitate as they swirl, and so does his gaze which contemplates melancholically the beyond); the woman looking at us unabashedly, even though we intercepted her standing stark naked in front of her bathtub, yet “dressed” in all her jewelry (earrings, bracelet, an elegant small watch on her plump little hand); the other bather, this one not of the bath but of the sea, lying on her towel in the sand, naked as well, also wearing her jewelry; all of them have something captivating. You want to laugh, but you can't; something grips your heart, and you smile bittersweetly.
Though portly all of them, it is not so much the bodies that unify Fernando Botero's paintings' heroes, but the faces: round, rather expressionless, definitely unsmiling, with wandering gazes and, in my opinion, melancholy. After seeing dozens of paintings with variations of these characters, you are convinced they live in a land of their own, and we, the spectators, gain access to their realm through the Colombian artist's work. Like a shaman, Botero opens a gate to another dimension, where the rotund inhabitants eat ice cream and oranges, go pick-nicking, pose for family portraits while apples fall in the background, in a reality that looks a lot like ours, but is, at the same time, elusive, diluted.
But it is in sculpture that the apotheosis of curves awaits: black, greenish, reddish, deliciously glossy, the bronze works clearly reach the sphere of myth – the bird that is “harvesting” a juicy female figure brings to mind immediately Leda and the Swan, and, indeed, nearby, can be seen another sculpture with precisely that subject and title.
I feel ashamed that, until visiting his museum, I had lightly filed Botero as “that visual artist with the oversized little people.” Maybe it was because his figures are so famous and recognizable. Two of his enormous sculptures, Adam and Eve, stand in the ground-floor lobby of the busy Columbus Circle shopping galleries in New York City. Poor Adam has not simply been reduced to an easy meeting point (something like the historical “Bakakos” pharmacy, a popular meeting point in downtown Athens, back in the day); he has also been subjected to the humiliation of having had the most... protruding part of his body get worn off, since the crowds, tourists and New Yorkers alike, do not simply want to have their picture taken in front of the naked male progenitor, but also to touch his genitals.
Back in Bogotá, the mountain, steaming after the afternoon storm, is just a hair's breadth away: a part of the Andes is suspended above the mega city. If you cast your gaze up, you can picture the golden geometric creatures and the rounded people live on, somewhere beyond the mountain range.
This essay first appeared in Greek in the TA NEA newspaper (in print and online) on March 21, 2023.
It was reproduced by HellasJournal.com.
Το κείμενο αυτό πρωτοδημοσιεύτηκε στην εφημερίδα ΤΑ ΝΕΑ (έντυπη και ηλεκτρονική έκδοση) στις 21 Μαρτίου 2023.
Αναδημοσιεύτηκε από το HellasJournal.com.
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