From Arte al limite news article:
Hiding in a shoebox, he put his head out and gets out. When he managed it, he takes a pen, a sheet of paper and he started to draw. This is his passion. The results were positive because he had a good teacher. Roberto Fabelo, Gabriel’s father, opened and showed to Gabriel his favorite box where the most fantastic end surreal creatures that the human eye could ever see. Gabrielito, as he was call affectionately, is dazzled by the traces, the excellent compositions, the grotesque figures and the disproportionate game that sometimes is established with human being’s anatomy. These elements are part of his daily reality. He grew up and spoke with them. He had contacts and for certain he watched them constantly, laughing and imaging at the same time.
Gabriel Fabelo Hung, the youngest of the family, has great skills as a draftsman, a defending manifestation since his days in the corridors and classrooms of the San Alejandro Academy until his short but steady journey through the land of the Higher Institute of Art (ISA.) He has traveled and experienced different trends in Cuban art; he makes installations; he enters in the universe of conceptualism; he runs a work in fabric without difficulties and involves pieces of cardboard, paperboard or any support that allows him to develop and unleash his inexhaustible imagination. His iconography, has similar features to the creations of Roberto Fabelo; however, the paradigms has changed; mythological and fictional beings are created but also characters like Super Mario, Batman, Superman and other cartoons that pertain to his context are present.
The generation that he belongs is characterized by a saturation of the image of cheap advertisement and consumerism, the latter is an “ism” very own of the emerging art made by young people born in the mid-nineties. His concerns spin, then, to reflect on what is happening around him, his context is different, live (all) in constant changes; I think this is the right word to define his artistic praxis. His style and iconography, which is gradually consolidating, refers to his spirit and the localism of our visual field. He draws new figures and he places us with a dual experience, because his drawings at first sight, they seem like notes (item that it may be presented in this way) but Gabriel shows us his final result. So we are in front of the drawing as sketch and the drawing as work.
Depending of what Gabriel Fabelo Hung wants to transmit, different techniques are selected for the realization of each of his pieces. He advocates for the use of gouache, Indian ink, pen, pencil, oil, acrylic, and all the materials that open a range of infinite expressive possibilities for him. Of course, everyone responds to trends such as expressionism and surrealism, which are absorbed influences and well appreciated in each of his pictorial productions. From his imagination get out and come alive deformed and grotesque characters, in gestures of pain and anguish, accompanied by words that ratify their actions; also, each figure takes critical positions regarding to various issues and current events that concern his creator. For this same line of work, an installation is under the precepts of conceptualism made with extracted papers of Granma publication (official newspaper of the island.) This newly executed piece forms a vignette extracted from comics (power consumption of Gabriel Fabelo) that has inside the term “word.” Here, the artist plays with the concept of word and the material which is made of. We are a society guided by what is said or mention, the word medium of communication is sacred by excellence and in our context has its particularities. The speech is decaying, the paper is corroded, the word is left behind and the new generations do not heed of what is said. They live their time, Gabriel, is the son of his historical moment and the artistic scene in which he develops.
Each drawing, canvas or collage of Gabriel Fabelo Hung, testify their plastic axioms in a universe where doing something novel becomes more difficult. We could say that his production is gaining strength in each of its new proposals; he does not stand still, he researches, studies and travels through different manifestations and trends. It is too early to get into specificities such as he has his own label. His way of think or facing his day and his relation with his context, is what makes this artist’s creations possess certain peculiarities in the panorama of emerging art of the island.
