Pedro Pablo Oliva belongs to that species of men that is on the edge of extinction, and for that reason he deserves to be preserved. His works will bring to the receptor the pleasure of a solid product, mature and of a strong personality.
To perceive each vision “made by him”, the spectator requires of a sensibility prepared to capture other meanings of beauty, and even indirect levels of the messages and searches that may coincide with a post-modernist spirit. Faithful to an imagination with expressionist shades, to the pulse of the popular that has transcended and to the fantasy of the social and familiar experiences, the paintings of the artist take us by surprise because of his maturity in the work, in which he manages to form a very personal iconography.
Actually, Pedro Pablo Oliva, who was born in 1949, in Pinar del Río, where he has done all his work and where he still lives, enjoys too much the caprices of the drawing. Since a long time ago he participates in a new adventure, leaving behind those pictorial chapters of images from a novel, of fables and hallucinations founded in the Cuban countrysides, very near to the work of great creators such as Abela, Acosta León, Carlos Enríquez and Servando Cabrera.
Nowadays, his pieces are testimonies of a reality that he captures in each painting or pictorial drawing with a skillful hand. On fabrics and cardstocks the persons vibrate, the landscapes, the problems that hunt us daily; and that take him to be closer to parodies and caricatures. There is variety and richness of spatial concepts which reveal again this lyricism, sensuality and aggressiveness always controlled and full of suggestions.
Two dimensional and infinite spaces which don’t disseminate an answer, but thousands of interrogations, are fertile lands where the creator (First Prize of the VIII National Youth Hall of Plastic Arts of Havana in 1980, and Prize of Acquisition of the Girón National Hall, Fine Arts Museum in 1981, National Hall of UNEAC in 1990…among others), displays a vast conceptual reading between readings and dreams.
In Pedro Pablo Oliva – who graduated from the Provincial School of Plastic and Applied Arts, Pinar del Río, 1964, and from the National School of Arts (ENA), 1970-, there is some of the spirit of the greatest, in his compositions, environments, chromatic ranges, refined techniques, and well finished pictorial surfaces, and above all: his preoccupation with the problems of these times which are ours; the artist faces them with his painting. Each work of Pedro Pablo Oliva is a universe of multiple references, still to be discovered.
