Cara a Cara
The Association NOEMI - Espace Brownstone hosted Cara a Cara (“Face to Face”), a rare and resonant dialogue between Cuban artist Roberto Diago and French artist Ernest Pignon-Ernest. Though from different generations and geographies, both artists explore identity, memory, and social struggle through a visual language rooted in human presence.
Diago, known for his powerful abstract compositions tied to Afro-Cuban heritage and colonial trauma, presented works that confront the weight of historical silence. Pignon-Ernest, a pioneer of urban art in France, contributed his iconic figurative installations—paper-based interventions that place the human body at the heart of public consciousness.
Together, their works formed a visceral conversation on resistance and resilience, where drawing, material, and absence revealed shared concerns around race, dignity, and the body as a political space. Cara a Cara invited viewers to witness this cross-cultural face-off—not as a confrontation, but as mutual recognition.
Diago, known for his powerful abstract compositions tied to Afro-Cuban heritage and colonial trauma, presented works that confront the weight of historical silence. Pignon-Ernest, a pioneer of urban art in France, contributed his iconic figurative installations—paper-based interventions that place the human body at the heart of public consciousness.
Together, their works formed a visceral conversation on resistance and resilience, where drawing, material, and absence revealed shared concerns around race, dignity, and the body as a political space. Cara a Cara invited viewers to witness this cross-cultural face-off—not as a confrontation, but as mutual recognition.
Ernest Pignon-Ernest
French contemporary artist
Ernest Pignon‑Ernest (b. 1942, Nice) is a pioneering French urban artist and painter whose ephemeral street drawings, installed since the 1960s in Paris, Naples, and beyond, incorporate social, mythological, and poetic narratives—honoring figures like Rimbaud, Pasolini, and Caravaggio, and addressing social injustice, AIDS, and apartheid. A self-taught figure aligned with Situationist and Fluxus movements, his black-and-white posters launched in 1966 to protest France’s nuclear policies and now position him as a foundational influence in global street art.
Explore Ernest Pignon-Ernest’s other artworks
Roberto Diago
Afro-Cuban contemporary artist
Roberto (Juan Roberto) Diago (b. 1971, Havana) is a prominent Afro‑Cuban artist who graduated from San Alejandro in 1990 and works across painting, sculpture, and installation to explore Cuba’s racial history, memory, and identity using found objects and conceptual forms. A descendant of the influential artist Roberto Juan Diago Querol, his work mixes abstraction, raw materials, and Afro-Cuban themes, and has been shown at Havana Biennials, the Cooper Gallery at Harvard, and museums in Cuba, the U.S., and Europe.
Explore Roberto Diageo’s other artworks
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