Fernando Botero, the renowned Colombian painter and sculptor, is also a brilliant draftsman who every day finds, as he declares, more interest and greater joy in the work of pencil on paper. Botero's drawings, which until now have been like the most secret part of his work, are not simply reduced to being notes or sketches for later works, but they contain an end in themselves. Botero has worked with them with growing interest since drawing is not a minor art, on the contrary, it is a risky, concise and demanding artistic language.
This book, which recovers a good part of that production, constitutes a splendid gallery of portraits, in which the handling of line and the game of proportions is a lesson in virtuosity. The essay by Marc Fumaroli, from the Academie FranÇ aise, is a lucid theoretical contribution on the work of the cartoonist Botero, in addition to placing the artist in the new perspectives that open the multiple evaluations of his drawings.
