The news of the death of Fernando Botero is a mark that marks the journey of a universal artist.
The most important in our country has been the great Nobel Prize winner, Gabriel García Márquez, with an immense work, read and admired.
Having met Gabo is an immense joy because of his human and controversial dimension.
It is not the same with Botero, a creator close to Europe, in his convictions, in the way he made art and also where he exhibited it.
I must say that we have little closeness with the different facets of his talent.
Too many praises will come, but the Colombian in general has a visual reference, if anything journalistic, of his career.
Gabo and Botero are on different, but not common, grounds.
They established their qualities before the existence of social networks, a thermometer that changes everything that exists.
Gabo and Botero are what lasts.
We already see how Shakira exploits with her talent that web of social networks, where music liquidated its traditional structures, the printed album, the radio platforms, and places a singer, regardless of whether he is good or bad, in the millionaire figures. of some rhythms, while others, like salsa, survive based on a specific talent.
Eddie Palmieri is a minority legend.
While other composers strive to ensure that a genre does not disappear.
There are no longer single criteria, irrefutable truths.
What is the value of a musician who fills a stadium? How do musicians move who do not have enough power to impact the networks, and have their validity in a nightclub with a thousand people?
Gabo was something else, enormous and transcendental.
Wise and tough.
Hearing it, for those of us who had that privilege, is something that one is grateful for.
I knew him for years.
It is not the same with Botero, whom I look at with respect, in a country that does not even know how to read him.
In the midst of so much mediocrity.
Of the means that are horrible, they give us a place in the world.
We exist for Gabo, for Botero, admired on the big stages.
Honor to the teachers, to the different, to those who leave an eternal mark, to be studied and analyzed!