ROBERTO DIAGO, BETWEEN TRUTH AND TIME
Octavio Zaya
The work of Roberto Diago (b. 1971) boasts a long lineage of Afro-Cuban cultural expression, where history, memory and identity are not abstract notions but lived, embodied realities. Diago’s practice confronts the ongoing legacies of slavery and colonialism, insisting that these histories are not sealed in the past but remain alive in the present, etched into matter as much as into flesh. To encounter his art is to come face to face with the persistence of trauma, and with the resilience of survival.
This concern for history is inherited as much as it is reinvented. His grandfather, Roberto Juan Diago Querol (1920–1955), broke new ground within the Afro-Cuban movement. In his modernist paintings, African motifs and Afro-Cuban spiritual references staked out the centrality of Black subjectivity within Cuban national identity, at a time when the official culture often sought to diminish it. For the elder Diago, history was no backdrop but substance itself: an active force demanding representation and dignity. His canvases carved out a space for African heritage within Cuban modernism, seeking visibility where there had been silence.
Rather than simply following in his grandfather’s footsteps, Diago carries the project forward, transforming it in radically new forms. As he explains: “My work goes neither beyond nor beneath my grandfather’s. It belongs to its own time, just as his belonged to his. My grandfather’s concerns, which were revolutionary at the time, about addressing the Afro theme in painting, had never been spotlighted before. He shone a light on them and introduced religious themes, the spirituality of the Black individual. That African spiritual wealth had not been embodied previously in Cuban art. Black people had been painted, but their legends, their mysteries, none of that had been interpreted. My grandfather did just that. As did Lam. My work is more social; it has more to do with history, with present conflicts, with the subsistence of man”*.
However, working with charred wood, rusted metal, discarded textiles and recycled ropes, the younger Diago in question forges a vocabulary of scars, traces and wounds. These materials are already marked by time, wear and violence, embodying what Paul Gilroy has described as the “living memory of the slave experience” within the Black Atlantic. He fuses these materials and fragments into assemblages where—as Suset Sánchez notes—“the seams are not concealed in pursuit of residual perfection, but deliberately left visible, a metaphor for the scar, for the keloid scar in particular: the raised mark that embodies the terror of the overseer’s whip on the backs of enslaved people within the plantation system.” In those marks resides the symbol of colonial extractivism’s violence, its ruptures inflicted on entire continents, on communities and families, on knowledge and ways of life that were forced to rebuild themselves out of broken memories, reconfiguring another kind of knowledge, syncretic and hybrid, spoken from the position of subaltern voices against the dominant figure of the white, Western, bourgeois, heteropatriarchal, Christian male.” Diago’s works evoke altars, coffins, shackles, bones: structures that resist the domestication of the past, insisting instead on its visceral weight.
Time itself becomes a material in his practice. Rather than a linear progression, he conceives of it as cyclical, recurrent, stratified: a palimpsest of traumas and resistances. Here Édouard Glissant’s notion of mémoire en partage—memory in common—feels especially resonant: history is not a sealed archive but an accumulation of traces, each marked by erasure and rewriting. Rust, ash and corrosion permeate his materials, making the passage of time tangible. They are not emblems of disappearance but of persistence.
Equally vital is the role of abstraction and symbolism. Like his grandfather, Diago draws on Afro-Cuban religious iconography and Yoruba forms, yet he reconfigures them into installations and assemblages that function as counter-monuments. They are not didactic illustrations of history, but poetic architectures of memory—spaces where history is felt rather than narrated. As Stuart Hall reminds us, cultural identity is not a fixed essence but a positioning, always in process. Diago’s practice embodies this principle: identity emerges not as a closed story, but as a dialogue with absence, fracture and survival.
The political urgency of his work is, therefore, undeniable. By questioning the official narratives of Cuba, which often downplay the Black experience, Diago carries out what could be described as a form of visual historiography. His pieces function as counter-histories, insisting on the presence of voices excluded from dominant narratives. Through abstraction, repetition and the tactile force of materials, he builds a critical archive: an archive that resists closure and demands that viewers recognise the persistence of racial inequality and its silences.
Resistiendo en el tiempo (Resisting through time), the piece that dominates this exhibition at Artizar, “has a lot to do with other pieces like those in the series Hombres libres, El Hijo del monte (Free men, the Son of the mountain)—Diago tells us—where you can see the fragmentation, the patches I use, the stitching, the keloid scar. Metals, even in the most abstract works (abstract because they do not have a specific representation) carry a symbolic charge. The keloid scar, the welding, the superimposition of one metal over another, the screw, the gap, the accident… I incorporate all of that and it remains a recurring theme throughout my work.”*
This monumental work embodies that archaeology of memory. Here history is portrayed as repressed but not extinguished, while also tracing an inner landscape marked by inherited trauma. First presented at the Malecón in Havana as part of the 2019 Biennial, fragmentation, inscriptions, welding and erasure dramatise the rewriting of history about the wound, emphasising Glissant’s intuition that memory in the context of the African diaspora is never singular, but always fragmented, stratified and opaque.
As a whole, the works of both Roberto Diagos—grandfather and grandson—articulate history and time not as neutral categories, but as active and shaping forces. For the grandfather, Afro-Cuban identity was affirmed within Caribbean modernism; for the grandson, history reappears as scar, wound and survival. Both generations embody Hall’s observation that identity is forged through struggle, through memory and the negotiation of difference. Their art reminds us that history is not only what has happened, but also what continues to demand recognition.
In this way, Diago’s artistic practice resonates deeply with the intellectual currents of the Black Atlantic. This work is both remembrance and resistance; it does not offer the closure of history, but an invitation to confront its ongoing presence. Looking at his pieces is to encounter time as trauma and continuity, to feel history as material and scar, and to recognise that the unresolved past persists, urgent and alive in the present. As Seneca said, ‘time reveals the truth’.
The asterisk* indicates Correspondence with the artist.
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