Latin American People

"You can find in my painting a world I got to know during my youth. It is a sort of nostalgia, which I have turned into the central theme of my work. [...] I lived fifteen years in New York and a long time in Europe, but this has changed nothing in my Latin American approach, nature and spirit. The communion with my country is total."

The points of reference for the young Botero were the multicolored boards and sculptures of colonial art, the direct and essential language of popular art and, with regards to the pureness of form, pre-Colombian art. These elements continue to be present in his paintings. They are the traits of a poetics that has refined over the years but which contain a cultural heritage that continues to be as spontaneous as ever and generating the same narrative force.