Art against racism

The art of Roberto Diago vindicates the wound of slavery that still lingers

Roberto Diago is a very prolific Cuban artist and one of the most prominent of his generation, who has become one of the greatest exponents of Afro-Caribbean art, with works full of African culture, the legacy of slaves and with much denounce racism. After exhibiting at the Clément Foundation in Martinique he arrives in Paris, at the Vallois Gallery, with a series of sculptures, paintings and installations.

His style is often associated with the Arte Povera movement of the 1960s in Italy, which uses simple or recycled materials by choice to criticize consumer society. However, the use of raw materials such as metal or wood by Diago (Havana, 1971) has another explanation.

He studied at the San Alejandro Academy of Plastic Arts. He is part of a generation of artists who began their career with the embargo and also with the fall of the Berlin Wall. This resulted in a shortage of everything, including materials, which led him to recycle in order to carry out his works.

“After I graduated the Berlin Wall fell. There was a shortage of everything, materials, food. And things remain similar. No, not much has changed. And so my work is characterized by that, I use what I find, because I had to create no matter what,” explains the artist.

In his works, the essence of the slave in the contemporary black man is very present. An essence that he claims in each of his plastic works, sculptures and installations.

“I have tried to collect an entire criterion of a generation and express it, especially of black people in the contemporary world. How that slavery has affected until today and why. This has allowed me a coherent dialogue with people and I have maintained this, recycling, incorporating historical texts, letters, slave documents into the work, all of this is what makes up my work,' says Diago, whose artistic vein comes from In his family, his grandfather was the Cuban avant-garde painter Roberto Diago Querol (Havana, 1920 - Madrid, 1955).
The Cuban artist has always denounced the still prevailing racism in a very frontal way with messages written in his works such as 'My story is blood' or 'Black + black = shit'. For Diago, to be black in Cuba today is to be “an individual who fights for what he wants, who suffers, who has fun. It is a very complex phenomenon,” confesses the artist whose style has been compared to that of the New Yorker Jean-Michel Basquiat.

Diago has a large archive of slave ownership certificates that he also uses in his works. “I have dedicated myself a little to finding them in libraries and with private individuals who sell their documents and I have bought them, I give them to people so that they have them in their hands. The letters of freedom are very raw, very hard. Being told it in a history class is not the same as having it in your hand. It's like having a shackle. I also have objects from that period and I make them interact in some of my exhibitions,” explains the artist.

The keloid, the eternal scar
Another constant in Roberto Diago's work is the keloid, that thick scar that he incorporates into his works to remember the wound of slavery on black people. "It is a scar that in the case of black melanin is very evident. That is why there is an expression in Cuba that when someone has that kind of scar, they tell you 'you look black'. I use it a lot, especially in the sculptures, it allows me to give a drawing in a line and people look at it, ask questions and from there we begin to develop a dialogue," he says.

For decades he worked more on painting and installations despite having trained as a sculptor at the San Alejandro Academy of Plastic Arts. For some time now he has rescued sculpture as a means of expression. Some of his bronze and wood busts can be admired these days in the Vallois Gallery in Paris.

Some very solemn busts that generate a feeling of loneliness and meditation. "I try to represent the individual in that precariousness that history left behind. Only with eyes and no mouth. I fragment my works a lot, for example, I use pieces of cloth, like a man who is being formed everywhere, with all the pieces that finds and remains a solid, unique, strong piece that challenges you," concludes the artist.