Hola Karen y Marty:
The Che Memorial and Sculptures were created by Cuban sculpturist
José Ramón Lázaro Bencomo (DELARRA).
Here's a bit of a bio on him from the Cubarte Website.
Galeria Cubarte DELARRA,artistic pseudonym he used to identify himself until he made it his own in the most oficial way possible) was from San Antonio de los Baños where he was born in 1938. He began to study sculpture in 1949 in Villate’s art school, and later continues studies in the San Alejandro school. But before graduating he was forced to leave the country due to the persecution from some of Batista’s hired killers who “had their eyes set” on the young sculptor who was the son of a communist cobbler.
However, his long European tour, which he interrupted in 1959 to return to his homeland, earned him the teaching of great sculptors like José Clará (in Barcelona) or Victorio Macho (in Toledo), or artistic practices like being a copyist in the Museo del Prado in Madrid, or helper and pupil of sculptor Antonio Berti in the Florence School of Fine Arts who at the time was performing a work in the Vatican. Visits other European countries such as Holland, Germany, Belgium. This experience of his training years, to which we must add teachers such as Sicre, or his work as a helper of Fernando Boada, were for DELARRA but a boost and a motivation to find his own way of expression, which was not content with belonging to a specific stylistic trend, but expressed through experimentation and the incursion into different field of visual arts.
One of his greatest influences was, no doubt, teh monumental work of Teodoro Ramos Blanco and of Juan José Sicre, and perhaps the monument to Mariana Grajales and the Martí of the Civic Plaza, currently Plaza de la Revolución, his greatest inspirations to make incursions, from the ouset of the Revolution into public, commemorative sculpture.
In the sixties he ventures to hold multiple didactic expositions in schools, factories, parks especially from the Havana Central Park, to the Güira de Melena park, which witnessed a mobile exposition which he entitled “Revolutionary Sculpture” so the people can know that art expression while he makes practical demonstrations of how a sculpture is made. Thus his work is always in direct contact with its immediate receiver. But at the same time, he makes incursions into ceramics, graphic illustration, engraving: he is one of the founders of the Graphic Arts Experimental Workshop of Havana, he holds several lithography expositions on different themes and sketches especially about horses which is one of his most recurrent themes: the animal not only as strength and aerodynamic beauty, but as a main character in our fight for independence and Cuban nationality.
He obtains numerous prizes during that time: First Prize of the Competition calñled buy the University of Havana to give a sculpture of Ruben Martínez Villena to the Central Library of that study center. Professor and principal of the San Alejandro, Director of Visual Arts of Havana, creator of the Culture Center, lecturer, manager of a handicraft enterprize.
However, when we say DELARRA, one always think of his monuments: Engels’s monumental head in Pinar del Río, the equestrian sculpture of Generalísimo Máximo Gómez in Camaguey, the monument ot the derailing of the armored train in Santa Clara, or the Revolution Squares in Bayamo and Holguín.
Although from an stylistic viewpoint his work is eminently figurative, he has abstract solutions: the monument of the derailing of the armored train incorporates the wagons of the train as sculptures,and large concrete wedges, somel 15 metros long roject themselves against them t represent the rebels’ action or the bombs thrown during the battle, all through geometric figures.
However, his work is not limited to the homeland. Always basing himself on historical research, on a symbology that was never hermetic, always searching for photographic information and even personal relics of the heroes he represented, he tried to convey to the spectator the history of the person he was sculpturing, in such a way that the aesthetic values were added to the symbolic content as a single whole.
When he makes the sculpture complex devoted to José Martí in Cancun, along with architect Fernando Salinas, he does so wth a monument that suggests “...a flower, a maguey, a hand...” in a way that it harmonizes not only with the surrounding landscape, but also with the representations of the plastic art of the Mexican avant-garde.
In the state of Quintana Roo in Mexico he also carried out an ambitious project, where, on a surface 19 m high with a 40 m diameter, he symbolizes the history of that people.
Other countries were witness to his art, Uruguay, Dominican Republic, Japan (with a monument in Nagasaki in homage to the victims of the nuclear holocaust), in Spain (with a monument in honor of José Martí in the Ciudad de La Habana Square in Gijón. In Angola also he erected a monument in homage to all the Cubans who died there, which is stands out for the respect he shows towards the history and culure of that people: there Delarra represented the Angolan provinces, the ethnic groups, the traditions, their typical plants next to the royal palm, Cuban and Angolan soldiers las tradiciones, sus plantas características junto a la palma real, soldados cubanos and angolanos united in the struggle. Besides, we must note that he used Angolan sculpturing material and said that Luanda marble is better than Carrara marble.
The great interest he always showed in conveying his knowledge and his experience can be seen in a visual arts picture book, eminently for the public and aimed at those who are interested in those disciplines, which didactically provides general knowledge going from engraving techniques to the history of the Alma Mater statue.
For DELARRA the monument to Che in Santa Clara was a unique and desired opportunity, and he will always be remembered on account of it. He worked on that monument for six years to give it the wide scope we know it for. It is not only Villa Clara’s Che, with his arm in a sling, it represents a cmplete whole: his decision of being a doctor and a fighter, voluntary work, his speech at the UN and his farewell letter to Fidel. He is, furthermore, a Che that walks, that moves, that turns toward South America to fulfill his fate.
When Che’s and his comrades’ remains were found in Bolivia, Delarra once again becomes involved in the project of the Memorial and sculptures the image of the 38 guerrillas who fell in Bolivia.
The title of chronicler of the Revolution and sculptor of Che, given to him by those who know his work and his human stature, has been well earned. José Delarra’s death was deeply felt in artistic and political circles in Cuba and abroad.
One day, standing by the Che Monument, Delarra said: “If it falls, I’ll fall with it, artists and ship captains live and die with our work”. But his work has transcended him, it has become part of our visual culture, of the plastic surroundings of Cubans who, day by day, see their own history sculptured by Delarra.
Here's a couple of other websites with info on the Che Memorial.
enjoy
Steve
http://www.hellocuba.ca/itineraries/310Che_Memorial.html http://www.granma.cu/INGLES/junio02-2/23che-i.html
Topic: Re: Che statue in Santa Clara... (Read 4935 times)