Botero

This famous Colombian painter of obese people has shifted his sights on the Abu Gharib scandal. The figures are still corpulent but this article made us admirers of his artistic mission.

The fact that I’ve done painting with pleasant subject matter doesn’t make it impossible for me to do work on a subject that touched me very much. Fortunately, I’m a figurative artist, and I can speak directly. I didn’t change my style at all. I painted in exactly the same way. I don’t believe you have one style for dramatic things and another for pleasant things. It’s the same style—the same forms, the same treatment of color and composition, the whole thing. The subject matter is the only thing that is different.