Art, Violence, and Boterism

1/29/2026

At first glance, Fernando Botero’s paintings can almost seem humorous or even pointless. His figures are rounded, exaggerated and so unique, his paintings earned their own art style: Boterismo. To the untrained eye, his figures look confusing, and unrealistically overweight. But when looking through the lens of history and politics, those figures appear in scenes of massacres, terrorism, torture, and oppression.

That's what makes Botero’s political art so powerful to me. He does not abandon the whimsical style that made him famous when he turns toward violence or life altering poltics. Instead, he places his familiar, almost playful figures directly inside some of the darkest moments of Colombian and world history. The result is unsettling because the paintings refuse to look the way we might expect paintings about violence to look. That is part of Botero's imapct. His paintings do more than illustrate historical events. They force the viewer to confront them and view from a new perspective, depicted in a new way.

In The Car Bomb, for example, the softness of the figures clashes with the destruction around them, creating a cartoonish, collapsing world that reminds us of the chaos of such an event. In his Abu Ghraib series, he gave prisoners visible expressions of pain while keeping their torturers largely out of sight. It wasn't the perpetrator that mattered, but the pain of those suffering.

Botero once argued that art does not change anything. I’m not sure it needs to. His work shows that art can do something different: preserve memory. Governments can change, wars can end and headlines can disappear, but a painting can keep an event in front of us long after the news cycle has moved on.

That makes Botero more than a painter of unusual figures. He became a kind of historical witness, using a style associated with humor to make some of history’s darkest moments harder to forget.