Bound for Cuba Sculpture of Che Donated by Italian Artists

Inspired by Ernesto Che Guevara, Italian artists Giovanni Bartolozzi and Clara Tesi are the authors of a unique sculpture dedicated to the Argentine-Cuban revolutionary, donated by them.

Born in Pistoia in 1941 and 1944, respectively, Bartolozzi and Tesi hold an extensive and varied work, pictorial, and sculptural, sculpted by them and exhibited in Italy and other countries.

The piece sculpted in white Carrara marble is a two meter tall in the shape of an oval with the effigy of Che, designed after the iconic image captured by photographer Alberto Díaz (Korda), on March 5^th, 1960, during the burial of the victims of the sabotage of the French ship La Coubre, in Havana.

The monolith carved in bas-relief has an internal system of lights equipped with an automatic twilight start mechanism of gradual intensity, associated with sunset until reaching full light capacity at night.

On these and other features related to sculpture, moved by sea to Havana for its location in a spot still undetermined, Prensa Latina spoke with Bartolozzi and Tesi, united for decades in life and art.

Where the marble is thinner, the luminosity is clearer and where it’s thicker is darker with grayish gradients, Clara indicated in the interview with Prensa Latina, in which her husband explained how from the progress increasing light emerges “a hologram that revives and stares back at you”.

In that sense, she compared the technique used with holographic printing to through spectral curves to attain a three-dimensional effect. If I sculpt marble as a negative image, she said, the light will turn it into a positive image and that's why the image looks bas-relief when it's off and on high relief when turned on.

This is the first time at all that this technique has been used, which we registered four years ago in the patent office of the city of Lucca, she said when referring to the two-meter-high sculpture, which is mounted on a parallelepiped and a base, until reaching a height greater than four meters.

The work, built in 2017, was part of the exhibit “The Light of Time. The Time of Light”, inaugurated on December 9^th of that year in Pistoia and exhibited, in June 2021, in Montignoso on the occasion of the visit to that town in the Tuscany region of Aleida Guevara, daughter of the revolutionary leader.

Back then, the authors announced the donation of the work, they were helped by National Association of Friendship Italy-Cuba and the non-profit organization Cospe to move it to Havana.

Having a marked humanistic vocation, both manifest a special admiration for the life and work of Ernesto Che Guevara, whom Giuseppe compares with Saint Francis, the saint known for his altruism and commitment to the poor.

He is a lay saint and that’s why we wanted to represent him by putting an albatross instead of the star on the beret, to highlight the intellectual Che Guevara, philosopher, poet, art lover, wonderful, a facet unfortunately not too well known, she pointed out when referring to the allegory of the bird in Charles Baudelaire's poem.

We owe Cuba a lot because it has taught us that freedom is the most precious thing, affirmed the artist, convinced that this condition “is not in capitalism nor in individualism", but in the "equality of beings humans” in a society that’s not perfect “but fair”.

In Cuba, no child sleeps on the street and no grandparent lives under a bridge, underlined Giuseppe and Clara, excited about the possibility of travelling to Havana to attend the first exhibition of the work.

Translated by Amilkal Labañino / CubaSí Translation Staff