Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs, because I’m going to talk to you about Roberto Fabelo, and you will discover that beyond your worldly private views in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, there is a Cuban artist who draws on burnt pots with the same intensity as Goya engraved his nightmares. Born in 1950 in Guáimaro, this compulsive graphomaniac has transformed every available surface into an artistic territory of conquest, from the yellowed pages of a nineteenth-century anatomy treatise to the walls of the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Havana.
Look at his Sobrevivientes climbing the facade of the museum, these giant cockroaches with human heads that immediately evoke the Kafkaesque metamorphosis. But where Kafka remains stuck in his Prague room, Fabelo explodes the narrative on the walls of Havana. These hybrid creatures are not merely literary illustrations; they embody the resilience of the Cuban people, the ultimate survivors who, like cockroaches, would resist even a nuclear apocalypse [1].
Fabelo’s obsession with Kafka goes beyond mere reference. In his 2023 Madrid exhibition, he presents Metamorphosis where the protagonist of the short story splits, becomes two-headed. This multiplication of perspectives is not just a formal exercise. It reflects the contemporary Cuban condition, this insular schizophrenia where each citizen must navigate between several contradictory realities. Kafka’s cockroach becomes, in Fabelo, a political metaphor, a creature that survives in the interstices of the system.
The artist pushes this Kafkaesque exploration in his monumental installations. When he hangs from the ceiling those giant spheres covered with golden cockroaches (Mundo K), he is not just quoting the Prague writer. He creates a parallel universe where metamorphosis becomes a permanent condition, where human and insect fuse in a macabre dance that recalls both Goya’s Caprichos and the bureaucratic delusions of The Trial.
This fusion between literature and visual arts reaches its peak when Fabelo tackles García Márquez. Commissioned to illustrate a special edition of One Hundred Years of Solitude in 2007, the artist does not merely draw decorative images. He dives into magical realism like a free diver, resurfacing with impossible creatures that seem to have always inhabited Macondo. His women with bird heads, his miniature rhinoceroses that cross the back of a sleeping mermaid, all this participates in this same narrative logic where the fantastic becomes everyday.
But beware, do not believe that Fabelo is a mere genius illustrator. His work on the pages of Leo Testut’s Traité d’anatomie humaine reveals a more radical approach. By drawing directly on these nineteenth-century anatomical plates, he commits what he himself calls a “sacrilege” [2]. Yet, this apparent vandalism hides a more subtle operation: the transformation of the medical body into a poetic body, of diagnosis into delirium, of science into fiction.
Take Confusion Is Easily Committed, where skeletal hands metamorphose into figures of femme fatale and demonic king. Or Internal, which transforms the peripheral nervous system into a bearded sage on his knees. These drawings are not mere learned graffiti. They operate an alchemical transmutation of anatomical knowledge into hallucinated vision, reminiscent of Max Ernst’s collages but with a surgical precision that is uniquely Fabelo’s.
The Havana Malecón becomes, in his work, another text to be deciphered, an urban page where the desires and frustrations of an entire people are written. In Malecón Barroco and Contemplation de la perle, these monumental frescoes where naked women ride the mythical parapet, Fabelo does not simply paint a place. He maps a collective imagination, this open-air theater where the Cuban drama has been playing out for decades.
The artist transforms this seafront into a baroque stage where voluptuous bodies, carnival masks, demonic tails press together. But look closer: among the sensual curves and angel wings, hooks, pitchforks, nails violently pierce the wall. This duality between carnal celebration and mortal threat runs through all of Fabelo’s work, as if Rubens and Bosch had decided to paint together after a night of rum on the Malecón.
His Black Plates series from 2002 pushes this logic to the absurd. Porcelain plates present “meals” impossible: an elephant confronted by a hunter, a doll’s arm truncated from which emerges a tiny head, a pile of excrement accompanied by a spoon. These perverse still lifes function like visual haikus, fragments of narrative that refuse to constitute a linear story.
The installation The Weight of Shit (2007) deserves a closer look. A vintage commercial scale supports a pile of fake excrement and a spoon. The title plays on words like Duchamp with his ready-mades, but the most obvious reference remains Piero Manzoni’s Merda d’artista. Except that where Manzoni kept his shit in hermetic boxes, Fabelo exposes it, weighs it, quantifies it. This is the whole difference between European conceptual art and Cuban necessity: here, even shit must be measured, evaluated, perhaps even rationed.
Recycled pots occupy a central place in this economy of survival. Fabelo stacks them into totems (Towers, 2007), assembles them into the shape of Cuba (Island, 2006), transforms them into a cathedral (Cafedral, 2003). These used objects become the bricks of an architecture of resistance, the black pages on which he engraves anonymous faces, as if each pot carried the memory of all the meals it has served and all those it could not serve.
When he draws on these pot bottoms blackened by years of use, Fabelo does not merely recycle. He practices an archeology of the everyday, exhuming the traces of ordinary lives to transform them into icons. The faces that emerge from the soot are not individual portraits but collective apparitions, the ghosts of a domestic history that refuses to disappear.
The artist himself recognizes this dimension: “All Cubans are innate recyclers” [3]. But this recycling goes beyond mere material necessity. It is a philosophy, a poetics of transformation where each abandoned object becomes potentially sacred. When Silvio Rodríguez dedicates a song to him that speaks of “the country where even the waste is loved,” he touches the heart of Fabelo’s approach.
This transmutation of waste into art finds its most monumental expression in Delicatessen (2015), this giant pot bristling with hundreds of forks exposed on the Malecón during the Havana Biennial. The work functions like a silent scream, a collective hunger materialized in public sculpture. The forks planted like arrows transform the domestic utensil into a war monument, the daily need into a political claim.
Fabelo’s influences are multiple and acknowledged. He readily cites Dürer, Rembrandt, the Dutch masters. But it is with Goya that he maintains the most complex relationship. The exhibition MUNDOS: GOYA Y FABELO in Madrid in 2023 does not merely juxtapose the works. It reveals a deep filiation between the two artists, this same ability to transform the grotesque into the sublime, social critique into hallucinated vision.
Like Goya, Fabelo is a chronicler of his time who refuses flat realism. His hybrid creatures, his women-birds, his men-insects are part of this same tradition of caprice as a form of truth. But where Goya remains anchored in the Spain of the Enlightenment, Fabelo navigates the troubled waters of twenty-first-century Cuba, between endemic shortages and impossible globalization.
The use of Chinese embroidered silk in his recent paintings adds another layer to this visual testimony. The pre-existing floral motifs become a veil that distances the viewer from the subject, making the figures even more desirable. This technique recalls Sigmar Polke’s experiments on bedsheets, but with a thoroughly Caribbean sensuality.
In Three-Meat Skewer (2014), three naked women in high heels, transformed into a snail, a pig, and a bird, are skewered on a spit, ready to be consumed. The image is of frontal violence, but the embroidered silk gives it a perverse elegance, as if Sade had commissioned illustrations from Fragonard.
This tension between brutality and refinement runs through all of Fabelo’s work. His most aggressive installations (Round, 2015, where naked men carry forks like rifles marching on the edge of a giant pot) coexist with drawings of extreme delicacy on medical book pages.
The artist refuses easy categorizations. When asked if he feels free to express himself in Cuba, he replies: “I am my own administrator” [4]. This statement is not a diplomatic evasion but a claim of artistic autonomy. Fabelo does not make political art in the partisan sense of the term. He makes art that politicizes, that transforms every creative gesture into an act of resistance.
The suspended spheres of the installation Mundos (2005) summarize this approach. Five globes covered respectively with bullet shells (Petromundo), bones (Mundo cero), vegetable charcoal, cutlery, and cockroaches float in the exhibition space. Each sphere represents a potential catastrophe: the oil war, extinction, environmental destruction, famine, post-apocalyptic survival. But their suspended, almost graceful presentation transforms these dire omens into cosmic mobiles.
This ability to transmute horror into beauty, waste into treasure, the everyday into myth makes Fabelo much more than a “contemporary Daumier”. He is a visual alchemist who operates at the border between several worlds: between Cuba and the international, between literature and plastic arts, between social critique and personal lyricism.
His recent work presented at the Instituto Cervantes under the title Grafomanía reveals the extent of this graphic obsession. More than 150 drawings on all imaginable surfaces, from kraft paper to metal pots, testify to what the artist calls his “vice” of drawing. But this vice is not a weakness. It is the engine of a creation that refuses hierarchies between noble supports and makeshift surfaces.
The rhinoceroses that appear regularly in his work function as personal totems. In Romantic Rhinos (2016), a mermaid sleeps peacefully while a herd of miniature rhinoceroses crosses her back. The image is of enigmatic poetry, as if Fabelo had found a way to reconcile brute force and grace, reality and dream.
This reconciliation of opposites perhaps best defines Fabelo’s art. In a Cuban context marked by contradictions and impossibilities, he has developed a visual language capable of simultaneously embracing joy and pain, abundance and scarcity, freedom and constraint. His voluptuous women with angel wings and demon tails embody this fundamental duality.
The artist is currently working on a series of bronzes, a material he describes as “definitive” but not definitively chosen. This fluidity in the choice of mediums reflects an approach to art as a continuous process of transformation. In Fabelo, nothing is ever fixed, everything remains in permanent metamorphosis.
His Havana studio has become a place of pilgrimage for international collectors, even if, as he notes with irony, few Cubans can afford to buy art. This paradoxical situation of an artist celebrated worldwide but economically cut off from his own local audience is emblematic of contemporary Cuban contradictions.
Fabelo does not complain about this situation. He continues to create with an energy that seems inexhaustible, transforming every limitation into a creative opportunity. When he lacks canvases, he paints on silk. When he lacks bronze, he stacks pots. This adaptability is not merely technical, it is philosophical.
The exhibition “Fabelo’s Anatomy” at the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach in 2014 marked his first solo exhibition in an American museum. The title, a play on words on “Gray’s Anatomy”, highlights this obsession with the body as a territory of exploration. But unlike anatomical plates that dissect and classify, Fabelo’s drawings recompose and hybridize.
In Dream Dough (2017), a woman crowned with a shell rests in a plate of pasta, waiting to be devoured with the intertwined noodles. The image simultaneously evokes Peter Greenaway’s “The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover” and Jeunet and Caro’s “Delicatessen”. But where these films use cannibalism as a metaphor for bourgeois decadence, Fabelo makes it an ambiguous celebration of desire.
This moral ambiguity runs through all his work. His characters are never entirely victims or executioners, angels or demons. They inhabit an intermediate space where traditional moral categories collapse. This is perhaps why the artist rejects the label of political opponent. His art does not denounce, it reveals. It does not judge, it shows.
The recent life-size rhinoceros sculptures exhibited at the Kennedy Center (Sobrevivientes, 2023) mark a turn towards a more affirmed monumentality. These colored beasts that invade the public space function as ambassadors of a parallel world, that of Fabelo, where survival is achieved through permanent metamorphosis.
The artist turns 75 this year, but his work shows no signs of exhaustion. On the contrary, each new exhibition reveals new facets of his protean universe. From Kafka’s cockroaches to Washington’s rhinoceroses, from Havana’s recycled pots to Beijing’s embroidered silks, Fabelo continues to weave his web, creating a network of visual correspondences that defy geographical and cultural borders.
What ultimately strikes one about Fabelo is this ability to transform precarity into wealth, constraint into freedom. In a world of art often obsessed with novelty and rupture, he practices an art of continuity and metamorphosis. His references to the old masters are not nostalgic but vital, as if Goya, Bosch, and Dürer were his contemporaries, his accomplices in this enterprise of deciphering the world.
Fabelo reminds us that true art does not seek to please or to shock, but to reveal. His hybrid creatures, his transfigured objects, his personal mythologies are not escapes from reality but means of penetrating it more deeply. In a Cuban context where reality itself often seems unreal, his magical realism appears paradoxically as the most honest form of testimony.
Roberto Fabelo’s work remains difficult to categorize, and that is its strength. Neither purely Cuban nor truly international, neither completely figurative nor totally fantastical, neither strictly political nor simply aesthetic, it occupies an intermediate territory, a fertile in-between where contradictions become creative. This is perhaps what it means to be an authentic artist in the twenty-first century: to refuse boxes, to multiply metamorphoses, to transform each limitation into a new possibility.
- Peter Clothier, “Fabelo: Art Review”, Huffpost, 2014.
- “In Conversation: Roberto Fabelo on Fabelo’s Anatomy”, Cuban Art News Archive, 2014.
- “Roberto Fabelo: ‘I love even this island’s trash'”, OnCuba Travel, no date.
- Richard Chang, “Cuban art star makes Long Beach stop”, Orange County Register, 2014.
