The artist Roberto Fabelo, who is widely recognized as the contemporary Cuban Daumier, opens a doorto a world of wonder through a series of images depicting beings that come tous from a different dimension.
One section includes ancient medical texts illustrating strangely beautiful nude female torsos, sometimes winged, at other times sporting beaks peering out of the pages that seems to describe and catalogue these haunting and unusual creatures. Difficult to categorize, and even more difficult to define, these almost surreal images are brought to our consciousness as factual figures evidenced by the texts that catalogue them.
These anatomically correct figures and the texts that accompany them catalogue other works in the series that seem to further illustrate the worlds from where these creatures reside; their apparent daily activities, their relishing, their organic roots and their monumentality.
The pieces in embroidered silk represent these beings with a heavenly beauty that recognizes their immortality, their sacred character. Other drawings allude to its importance as icons and monuments.
These timeless images offer references to Dante's Divine Comedy, García Márquez's magical realism, Bosco's touch, skill in drawing Dutch and Flemish masters, and Rembrandt's soul. All testimonies for the work of this informed creator and his synthesis of elements of art history and their own unique sensibilities.
The metamorphosis of these human figures into Fabelo’s unique creatures parallels the transformation that takes place in the viewer when opening the possibility to these realities. The depictions are so real, that we are convinced they exist.
The bodies seem to emerge from an organic manna that generates all flesh containing creatures as if some giant crucible was producing them. The crucible is actually the container of the stew of images in the artist’s imagination.
Fabelo’s exhibition at the Museum of Latin American Art offers a glimpse, a privilege dentranceinto a complex body of images – a previously unknown world emerging from the inspirations of one of the most compelling artists of our time.
Stuart A. Ashman.
President and Executive Director of the Latin American Art Museum, MOLAA.