Fabian Peña at Dimension Variable

Fabian Peña (b. 1976, Havana) has been layering coils of magazine and newspaper strips to create a series of round components that together will make-up a larger structure. This structure will occupy most of the floor and coming together at an elevated point that protrudes into the air.

Fabian Peña reconstructs fragments of cockroach wings, crushed houseflies, hand-scripted text, and other materials rooted in animalia to inform man-made objects and environments. Peña‘s synthesization of nature and popular culture endows the contemporaneity of a baseball, graffiti, or allusions to Modern sculpture with a cellular level of timelessness.

The artist is among the growing ranks of artists who have gone natural, who are scavenging the world’s vivarium and rummaging through the life sciences in search of materials, ideas, cosmic verities, tragicomic homilies, personal agency, a personal agent, a way to stand out in the crowd.

Peña harkens to the Shakespearean interpretation of a corporeal “pound of flesh”, acknowledging the somatic price for locating beauty in the grotesque.