Vielmetter Los Angeles is pleased to announce Presence, an exhibition of new works by Afro-Cuban artist Roberto Diago, marking the artist’s first solo show on the West Coast. On view from July 25th through September 5th, 2026, the exhibition includes a suite of mixed-media portraits and still-life paintings completed over the last year.

Diago, who is based in Havana, is known for his critique of racism in Cuban culture and history, often using reclaimed materials found in his neighborhood to speak to the lived realities of Afro-Cubanos and the Black diaspora. His recent paintings reference modernist approaches to fracturing the picture plane and stripping down an image to its elemental forms. Grids, lines, and fragments of disparate materials cohere to provide a richly textured ground for the mask-like portraits, which are often featureless aside from a pair of eyes, a beaded necklace, and a swathe of color casting half of the face in shadow. The still life works are similarly pared down – silhouettes of a vase and a handful of circular flowers perched atop slender stems are set against a vibrant ground.

Since the 1990s, Diago has used his work to speak out against the persistence of racism within Cuban society, becoming a leading figure of the new Afro-Cuban cultural movement. Themes of ancestry and segregation percolate through his works and convey the artist’s lived experience in Havana after the Cuban Revolution. The paintings meditate on the way various peoples occupy space within a post-colonial society, the structure of the grid echoing the divisions and constraints faced by Cubans of African descent. Found materials such as wood, nails, and cord are laid bare, exposing their imperfections and allowing them to play a central role within the composition. For Diago, this rawness points to the precarity of the Afro-Cuban experience and to the textures of daily life. Diago’s work is currently included in the 61st Biennale di Venezia where his project Hombres libres / Free Men is on view in the Pavilion of the Republic of Cuba. In this project, Diago’s work in sculpture deals with the concept of freedom and bodily autonomy in the face of oppression and erasure. These themes are present throughout the artist’s oeuvre, which seeks to reclaim collective memory, visibility, and sovereignty of the Black body.