Afro-Cuban History, Salvaged
"Diago: The Pasts of This Afro-Cuban Present" at Art Museum of the Americas
USING PLANKS OF WEATHERED WOOD and slabs of battered metal, Diago undertakes a reclamation project that's both literal and metaphorical. The Havana-born and -based artist (whose full name is Juan Roberto Diago Durruthy) highlights the role of people of African descent in Cuba. It's a country whose melting pot, he protests, hasn't functioned quite so smoothly as the national mythology would have it.
Made between 1995 and 2022, the works in Diago's "The Pasts of This Afro-Cuban Present" feature the faces of Black Cubans, as well as the recurring motif of a nearly blank head whose only features are a pair of eyes. What's immediately striking about the Art Museum of the Americas exhibition, however, is simply its brawniness. The pieces are large, heavy, and often made of industrial materials.
De la Serie Variaciones de Oggun (From the Series: Oggun’s Variations) (Courtesy of the Artist)
Sometimes the material is the message, or at least part of it. Two large panels of stitched-together scraps of white canvas don't reproduce well, but are formidable in person. The black-and-white people-in-the-street photographs are upstaged by their reclaimed-wood frames, much larger than the pictures and scrawled with such slogans as "mi rasa" ("my laughter") and "yo te quiero" ("I love you'). Two hulking assemblages -- named in honor of Oggun, the Yoruba god of war -- approximate color-field paintings by juxtaposing welded rectangles of painted, partly rusted metal.
The moral here, as with other Diago artworks, seems to be that things just don't fit together neatly. A society's parts are jagged, antagonistic, and contradictory. But there's sheer joy in the complex textures and brilliantly artificial colors of the metal chunks, fitted together both awkwardly and beautifully.
Diago's figurative works are often raw and improvisational, suggesting the influence of graffiti-rooted American artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat. Some of the representational works, too, embody the themes of fragmentation, imperfect integration, and the lingering wounds of racism and enslavement. One of the many renderings of that face with only eyes is on two canvas segments that have been crudely sewed together, so that the ragged seam interrupts the face about where a mouth would normally be.
Sin título (Untitled) (Private collection)
Given the intentional rough edges of most of the pieces, the show's big surprise is an untitled bronze sculpture of that familiar face. (Made in 2022, it's the most recent entry in a show that's been seen in various configurations since it debuted in 2017 at Harvard University.) The head is a smooth oblong, breached only by two neatly recessed eyeholes, and the ripples that disrupt the statue's neck and shoulders do so gently and almost regularly.
"What I am doing is something like painting in a rap mode, to which I add the aggressiveness for which I am known," explains Diago in a statement displayed in the show. The artist's work is indeed fierce, but also has abundant finesse. Its components may be cobbled together craggily, yet in the end they seem to be ideally positioned.
Diago: The Pasts of This Afro-Cuban Present
Through Oct. 20 at Art Museum of the Americas, Organization of American States, 201 18th St. NW. museum.oas.org. 202-370-0147.