"...Abigail Varela feels himself to be --and indeed he is --a figurative sculptor.  Varela makes sculpture by affirming the figure, representing the human figure, the face, the body, the figure's form or its deformity, it's daily immediacy or its myths.  In his 1982 exhibition entitled Everyday Reflections, Varela showed works on flat sheets of black metal, upon which bodies merged in fixed contact, or could move by means of hinges.  These figures were men and women expressing the concept of the urban group, of anonymous beings, of diminished individuality made flat, almost eradicated, by the might of the urban community.  Varela presented the forms in repetition, suggesting growth, and continued growth:  man becomes the group, the group becomes a multitude, multitudes becomes mass.  the body becomes a silhouette or shadow.

WOMAN

In his most recent work, Varela searches out the single figure.  He has moved on from the flatness of the urban group --barely silhouetted --to the figure in the round, one with a specific weight, with a clearly individual existence.  The black silhouette had changed into the browns, blacks, reds and yellows of the 'personal' body.  The figure now colored and in the round, is female.  Woman, for Varela, is the most suggestive shape; and there he sees from the simple charm of a woman sitting in a chair or swing, to the prehistoric myth of the steatopygous Venuses so frequently found in different archaic cultures in Europe, Africa and America, figures who swollen female hips are clear references to the double fertility of woman and earth, and therefore to the divinization of love and life, a song to continuity, security and plentifulness.

Varela studied, in fact, pre-Columbian figures..."

--per the introductory essay by Maria Elena Ramos