
Pedro Pablo Oliva
El Beso, 2011Bronze sculpture, 182 x 41 x 31 cm.

Among his finest sculptural work, El beso outstands. This piece made in bronze with a great beauty and conceptual lyricism, and which is highly representative of the aesthetic values that depict most of this artist’s production. He is, undoubtedly, one of the most important exponents of Cuban art after the Revolution.
This stylish sculpture of 182 cm of height, shows us a beautiful young lady who, wearing a flowery dress, is descending from the sky to kiss her loved one, a little man sitting on a rock with a bunch of flowers in his hand. As it is typical of Oliva, this is a lyric, imaginary, oneiric scene. The beautiful young lady seems to have been born from the imagination of a dismayed being, who is looking to the sky in the solitude of the peak of a rock and begs for the presence of an idyllic love. And, like by a divine plan, the Venus appears, levitates above him and brushed his skin with a kiss. In this point, the sculpture plays with the cubist deformation of the human beings’ anatomic norms. Oliva turns both their necks so that we can see both faces in the consummation of the kiss, one facing the other, just like their bodies, in a visual plane that results improbable, mere formal invention of the artist. Oliva works the details of the costumes preciously, as well as those of the faces, the hair, and the extremities, creating beautiful and shining textures, as if bronze were a soft and malleable material like tissue, hair or skin themselves. It is, undoubtedly, a fabulous work that demands the audience to make by aesthetical joyful wanderings around it to end up surrendering, like weak voyageurs, to the sublime instant of a love kiss.