2023-08-26 17:08:55
In his studio in the neighborhood of El Cerro, where we lived, the boiling wax penetrated the cracks of small plaster molds with negative figures. Miniature faces later emerged from the meltable substance, previously sculpted by a sure hand and the help of fine toothpicks and dental tools made available to the art of modeling.
It was the 1960s and this is my earliest memory of watching him at work. Many times —in a long journey of ages and times— I have stood by his side while modelling, drawing or painting, and in this way I learned some skills related to the ways in which one had to hold the pencil to make a clean line or the brush to sketch a line freehand; apply glue, cut into the cardboard and use other gadgets typical of plastic creation, although I never dedicated myself to it or inherited that vocation.
The truth is that in our house the smell and the warp of plasticine, wax, wood, copper, stone, plaster or mud were always commonplace; also, the textures of the paper or the grammage of the graphite of pencils or charcoal, and of materials such as oil and turpentine, which were within reach.
Around a decade after the approximate date of that puerile evocation, in an almost hundred-year-old house in the Centro Habana municipality where we moved, in the parlor of the mansion on Xifré street, he set up his drawing table, surrounded by bookcases that amounted to to the top of the prop of the old building, to the same extent that it was made of a diverse and copious library.
That was his creative space while his work related to the reconceptualization of the function of art in Cuba kept him away from his studio on O’Reilly street, in Old Havana.
I had already overcome my stage as an observer next to his bench or work table when, in my adolescence, he re-took the large format monument; his great aspiration as an artist —says my mother.
So, I used to see him in that one, his “lucky little love corner” (as he used to call his workshop) up on scaffolding until the end of his strength each day, with a mass in his hand to compact enormous volumes of plasticine or modeling figures on that amalgam embedded in metallic skeletons, armed with meshes and pedestals.
It took many more years for him to perceive him as the protagonist of an extraordinary art. He had always accustomed me to his ability to turn a lump of clay into perfect figures and to his intelligence and talent to make dissimilar images emerge from any material with the skill of his hands.
So, I could only witness these bits of his work in person on exceptional occasions, but the magnitude and transcendence of his works and his explanations of how much he did, never neglected in the family environment, began to give me the measure of his stature as a sculptor. and artist.
I interviewed him a few times (few). I did not save the recording of the longest dialogue we held from those positions. I resisted thinking about death; it was too early for that.
But one day, like this August 26, 20 years ago, José Ramón de Lázaro Bencomo (José Delarra, his artistic name) left this world, despite the fact that we imagined him, even at that time, as a winner of adversity, so strong that he would be able to survive the vicissitudes of the body, even in difficult situations.
Since then, I have never been able to abstract myself from his presence. Especially in the face of his highest works, I continue to be by his side, with a singularity little related to the absence of life. Her work rose so much that in such circumstances she is still the same stature as that girl who, attracted by her curiosity, observed what her father was doing. (Published in Cubaenresumen).
Top image: Work of Isis de Lázaro made for this text.
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