about Fabio Esteban

I am originally from El Salvador and migrated to NYC in the late 70s. I consider myself lucky in that I arrived at a time of great social change which inspired my curiosity to learn about this new world. I started my carreer in fine arts and attended the School of Visual Arts in NYC, then took studio classes at the Art Student League of NY where I had influential teachers like Richard Pousette-Dart, youngest irascible from the historic Abstract Expressionist movement in New York. My work during this early period was quite dynamic and included sculpture, drawing from life and painting. I also discovered the beauty and simplicity of ink and paper and began to work on a series of sketchbooks that continue to evolve today.

I was young and didn’t quite know how to afford my education and so I had to drop out of school yet remained engaged in creating work. I was intrigued however by history and how ancient cultures crafted their world with a powerful visual language that fused their very existence. One day as I worked as a waiter in the West Village, a person asked me where I was from and when he learned he asked if I knew about the Maya culture. I was ignorant of any details but I did remember visiting ancient sites in my youth. The next day he gifted me a book: Incidents of Travels through Central America and the Yucatan by John Lloyd Stephens and Frederick Catherwood. These two explorers had re-discovered the ancient Maya culture that had laid hidden in the forest for centuries. Stephens’ prose and Catherwood’s recreations through a camera oscura in the 1840s completely inspired me and I knew then exactly what I wanted to do with my life - I wanted to become an Expedition Artist. So I asked the gentleman how I could achieve this dream and he simply said, you need to go to school and study archaeology. Bad grades and not the model student I had little chance of getting into school. However, he suggested a strategy. Ask for a meeting with the Salvadoran consulate in NYC and tell them that I need a letter of support to get into a university because I would become an archaeologist. I laughed and then actually got the meeting, got the letter and twenty years later became the first Ph.D. archaeologist in the history of El Salvador.

In the present I continue to make art and spend much of my time in the studio, painting, imaging, drawing and sometimes just staring at the ceiling and dreaming. This is an important part of the creative process. I have also managed in all these years to develop an intense interest for photography, alternative printing methods, and essentially merging all these layers into my very own visual language. I am interested in exploring these technical aspects of creativity and I’m also very interested in exploring my own identity, heritage and ancestry which I used to fuel, construct and create narratives that provide me with ways to express my curiosity as a form of protest. I have decided not to be invisible but rather an active agent of change and inspiration. My only treasure is this absolute freedom and I am grateful to have as well as the support from all who have believed in the power of my dreams.