Roberto Fabelo exhibits his dreamlike 'vice' with drawing at Cervantes

February 26, 2025

Any surface serves Cuban Roberto Fabelo to give free rein to his 'vice' with drawing, from a disposable airline bag to a used coffee maker, a kitchen pot or an animal bone, and a good sample of this can be seen these days at the Instituto Cervantes.

Titled 'Graphomania', the exhibition inaugurated this Wednesday by the artist comprises about fifty drawings of different formats, many of them with references to the literary world of writers such as Miguel de Cervantes or Gabriel García Márquez, with whom he maintained a special relationship.

Fabelo (Guaimaro, Cuba, 1951) illustrated the novel 'One Hundred Years of Solitude' in a special edition and his influence is also present in works such as 'Macondianos', a mural on kraft paper that constitutes a good example of his dreamlike imagination, hybridization of human and animal, of reality and fantasy.

Also 'Metamorphosis', with its evident reference to Kafka or a portrait of Don Quixote that he has donated to Cervantes and that will remain hanging on the ground floor of its headquarters in Madrid.

It is a large acrylic on embroidered silk titled 'The Dream of Alonso Quixano' in which the bust of Don Quixote appears crowned by a mermaid, a metaphor for his 'fertile imagination', as Fabelo explained during a tour prior to the inauguration.

Also acrylic on silk are the three busts of women crowned by forests and birds that he has called 'The Secret Life of Plants' and which constitute part of his most recent production, from this very year.

Nature and sensuality are recurring evocations in the displayed drawings, but also alarm signals, uneasiness or tragedy such as those that appear in the series of crayon on cardstock made during pandemic times or in the monumental 'Chained', an important work for the artist, which speaks of 'individual responsibility' and of 'assuming self-censorship'.

The rooster, 'symbol of tropical macho culture' appears ridden by a woman who brandishes the Cuban flag and a large rhinoceros is presented intervened in the vestibule of the Madrid building with fragments of poems by Jorge Luis Borges, Rafael Alberti or Luis García Montero, current director of Cervantes.

Fabelo acquired his 'vice' for drawing as a child and never abandoned it. Painter, draftsman, engraver, illustrator and sculptor, he studied at the National School of Art of Cuba and at the Superior Institute of Art in Havana and in 2004 received the National Prize for Plastic Arts.

El Bosco, Goya and Da Vinci are his 'guardian angels', said the artist, who in 2018 was the subject of a major retrospective in Havana. In Spain his work has been exhibited on several occasions, the most recent in 2023 in Zaragoza and in Madrid.

The Cervantes exhibition, curated by Mario José Hernández, can be seen until May 11.

The Cuban artist also deposited in the institution's Caja de las Letras an intervened coffee maker called 'Mama mía' (2010) and three drawings.

The Instituto Cervantes, located in the headquarters of the old Banco Español del Río de la Plata, maintains its old reinforced chamber, where it treasures legacies since 2007 from musicians, actors, writers, dancers, artists and cultural figures of all kinds, in what is known as the Caja de las Letras.