"The Poet", 1997

In “The Poet”, Botero combines his reminiscence of the landscape and the settlements of his native Colombia with a typical reclining figure of a man dressed in conservative, bourgeois clothing who is lying in a meadow reading a book, creating a bucolic scene whose ironic idyll is reflected in the title, which characterizes the sitter as a poet, in this way points beyond the banality of the scene. The mighty trees form a kind of portal or frame for the reader and underline the characteristic ambivalence in Botero's works, which oscillate between monumentality and naivety.