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Work

Contact

Work

Contact

Gallery

Representation

Darien has worked with international galleries such as Addictive Art House (Palm Beach), Graffik Gallery (London), and Kulture Cartel (Toronto & Dubai).

Darien has collaborated with notable artists including King Saladeen, known for his vibrant, urban-inspired iconography, Richie Billion and Mike Mozart, whose subversive takes on pop culture have earned cult status. These collaborations reflect Darien’s ability to merge diverse visual languages into his own signature style.

Artist

Collaborations

What are your inspirations? Or where do your ideas come from?

My work lives at the intersection of mythology and memory, fantasy and raw reality. I’ve always been drawn to the timeless power of myth, the grandeur of gods, the way their stories have echoed through thousands of years and still feel urgently relevant today. The idea that gods once walked among men has always fascinated me. Like in Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, I imagine a universe where these ancient deities still linger—some reinvented for the modern world, others fading into obscurity. To me, myths aren’t just old stories; they reflect who we still are—our desires, vices, and contradictions.
But my mythology is never just classical. It’s filtered through the foggy lens of my Cuban upbringing, where reality was often laced with limits and longing. With its cracked walls and sunlit streets, Cuba taught me that beauty can bloom even in the imperfect. As a kid, I’d catch glimpses of another world: the shimmer of the American Dream, the unapologetic freedom of forbidden films, the quiet seduction of a Playboy left on someone’s table.

These fragments were never truly mine, which only made them glow brighter in my imagination.
Fantasy became my obsession, not as an escape, but as a challenge. I asked myself: What if I could reach through the screen, step into the picture, and touch the life I’d only imagined? The female figure became my muse, not just for her form, but for what she symbolized. She became a modern goddess, part Pop Art, part pin-up, painted with the boldness of Warhol and the sensuality of rebellion. In my work, glamour is subversive. Desire is divine.
Today, I paint from the tension between two worlds, the one I lived and the one I imagined. I’m not painting dreams. I’m painting the friction between what was withheld and what was worshipped. Between mythology and memory. Gods and girls. I hope the result is personal but universal, a visual mythology for those of us raised on legends, longing, and the lure of what lies just beyond reach.

“I’ve always loved Rococo for its celebration of beauty, indulgence, and fantasy. I’m drawn to how patrons cast themselves in classical myths, reimagining their lives as heroic narratives. There’s something so unapologetically grand and self-indulgent about the whole movement—and the color palettes are just incredible. ”

— Darien Varona

Wonderland Universe

I have always loved the Adventures of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. CS Lewis had the incredible ability to blend fantasy and absurdity with very real world problems and the struggles of growing up. I fell in love with the characters of his universe and the bizarre logic that governed Neverland. I was always captivated by the talking flowers in his stories and imaged them as andromorphic flowers with the bodies of beautiful women and heads of flowers. Like humanity, beauty is fleeting and what better way to capture the beauty and fragility of youth than depicting beautiful women as carefree flowers frolicking in a magical universe. Just like the animal kingdom, animals are born ignorant of their inherent beauty and life totally free from self awareness, bodily shame and just exist as nature intended. I believe this is how talking flowers would exist in Wonderland, free of clothes unaware of their own beauty and in innocent sensuality

Wonderland Re-Imagined

An Erotic Surrealist Series by Darien Varona

Darien Varona’s Wonderland Universe invites viewers down a different kind of rabbit hole—a seductive, absurd, and tender dreamscape where beauty is worshipped, innocence is fleeting, and fantasy is laced with critique.
Loosely inspired by Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, the series unfolds across two distinct but connected realms.
Wonderland Universe is both a fantasy and a fable, a visual poem about innocence mistaken for seduction, and the way time inevitably pulls

even the most beautiful things back into the earth. In Varona’s hands, eroticism becomes a mirror, not a motive. This is a world of contrasts: performance and purity, spectacle and stillness, desire and decay. Through it all, Varona blurs the line between the erotic and the innocent, the satirical and the sincere. It's a world where we are invited not just to look, but to reflect on why we look, what we project, and what beauty truly means when it blooms without knowing.

The Court of Hearts

In this surreal kingdom, Darien Varona reimagines Wonderland’s royal court through the lens of erotic satire and Rococo opulence. Aristocrats are blindfolded by tradition, fish butlers serve champagne to topless courtiers, and queens wear crowns made of hearts and desire. Each character appears suspended between performance and pleasure, trapped in a theatrical ballet of seduction and absurd power.
Visual references to 18th-century fashion, pop culture, and dream logic

logic collide on checkerboard floors and floral wallpaper. The result is both humorous and haunting, a pageant of eroticism and excess, where fantasy becomes a lens for exploring control, vanity, and romantic mythology.

The Garden of Nymphs

In contrast to the court’s decadence, this sub-series blooms with quiet tenderness. Here, Varona introduces flower nymphs, nude, innocent figures with blooming flower heads, frolic freely in wild meadows, sip tea beneath toast-winged butterflies, and lounge in sun-drenched leisure.
Though strikingly sensual to the viewer, these beings are unaware of their beauty. Like animals or blossoms, they live without shame or self-awareness.

Their nudity is not erotic to them, it is simply natural. The sensual tone of these works emerges not from the figures themselves, but from the viewer’s gaze.
Each piece is a meditation on the ephemeral nature of beauty. Like real flowers, these nymphs are radiant but fleeting. Their innocence becomes all the more poignant because we know it cannot last.

"Gods Don't Share Thrones"

Collaborative work by Darien Varona & King Saladeen

This powerful artwork merges myth and modernity, blending the iconic story of Icarus with today's relentless pursuit of Artificial Intelligence. At its core, it poses a stark warning: humanity, like Icarus, may be flying too close to the sun.
In this piece, Icarus is reimagined not just as a tragic figure of myth but as a symbol for our time—his wings composed of data, his ambition echoing our technological ascent. Where Icarus sought to join the gods with wax and feathers, we now race to create our own form of sentience through AI, flirting with forces once thought divine. But as the title states: "Gods Don't Share Thrones."

By fusing King Saladeen's signature graffiti aesthetic with my own figurative realism, we've created a striking juxtaposition of style and substance, where classical ideals of beauty clash with the raw urgency of street expression. The canvas is littered with quotes and mantras that echo warnings from philosophers, prophets, and dreamers. It's both a tribute and a cautionary tale, a modern myth retold for the age of algorithms.
This painting mirrors our era: bold, defiant, and on the edge of something irreversibly transformative.

Floral Elegance

By Darien Varona

"Floral Elegance" is a provocative and visually arresting series by Darien Varona that reimagines the dignity and power of 18th-century portraiture through a contemporary lens. Inspired by the lavish world of Marie Antoinette, each woman is adorned with ornate wigs crafted from modern symbols of surreal indulgence—diamonds, blooming flowers, ice cream cones, and cotton candy. This fusion of hyper-opulence and today's beauty culture reflects a playful tension between past and present ideals of femininity.

Artists like François Boucher, Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, and Jean-Honoré Fragonard painted idealized, elegant women in lush, romantic setting, precursors to Darien's reimagined, modernized muses. Varona's technique, combining aerosol, airbrush, and classical brushwork, brings each figure to life with stunning realism. The women, often nude but never objectified, exude commanding elegance and confidence, reclaiming the regal poise of classical portraiture while embodying the magnetic allure of the modern muse.
This series blurs the line between old-world grandeur and contemporary fantasy, offering a vibrant visual dialogue about beauty, power, and the icons of our age.

In a Flash

Darien’s portrait reimagines the original Flash, Jay Garrick, as a mythic figure caught between ancient god and modern icon. Drawing from the Roman god Mercury, whose winged helm symbolized speed and divine swiftness, In a Flash fuses comic lore with fine art. The result is a heroic portrait rendered with reverence, less superhero, more messenger of the gods.

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