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For Cuban artist Manuel López Oliva, the demons he addresses are both personal and universal. While specifically addressing the concerns of his homeland, Lopez Oliva also aims to tell the stories of other societies with histories of struggle. His work speaks to the complex relationships between culture, history and human nature. Visually rich and physically commanding, his latest tapestry-like fantasy paintings are powerful statements that carry a certain authority and conviction, their strength derived not only from what appears on the canvas, but also from what is left to the imagination.

Rich in associations and intricate in technique, Lopez Oliva creates an original world, reflecting the laborious emergence of ideas that become more than their images. The artist borrows from an ancient vocabulary to achieve a dialogue between the relationship of contemporary culture and the political history of the past, building bridges that link past and present, fantasy and reality, culture, arts, politics, history. His work brings us the possibility of a world of truth and risk, of joy and battles, of shadows and hope.

—Judy Birke

[Main part of this text appears in Judy Birke Artist richly captures Cuba’s past and present complexities, Arts, New Haven Register, February 5, 2006]

"Manuel López Oliva's show at the Bates College Museum of Art offers tiers of meaning and sensuality on canvases so richly textured that they hardly seem to be created from paint. [...] Every element appears as tactile as cloth. In Fausto, the liquid background flows like the multicolored feathers of a pheasant. [...] As compelling as this lush, dense style is, it does not encroach on our sense of the classic.  Oliva's heraldic faces emphasize the centrality of ancient Greece to the Western world, even as his patterning of palm trees and pineapples recalls the Caribbean.  They remind us that Cuba, however isolated from the American experience, however imbued with the cultures of the Caribbean, has distinct European roots as well. [...] But the power of Oliva's work does not depend on his references.  You needn't go to the theater or know anything about Cuba to relate to the image of feathery vines sliding through the eyes of the figure in Antigone [....] Beyond their sensuous beauty, Oliva's paintings offer an implicit comment on the layered complexity of life."

—Donna Gold

[Source:  "Spotlight Reviews," Art New England, December 2003/ January 2004, p. 19.]

"The critical capacity of the artist allows the recreation and revision of all of art history, from pointillist pointillism to informalism, from figurative expressionism to geometric abstraction, including the virtual replication of the stylistic features of other idioms such as tapestry, stained glass, graphic illustration, mosaics, or miniatures, in much the same way as total theatre invites the use of mime, acrobatics, dance and painting."

— Rufo Caballero
Essayist and Art Critic

[Source: catalogue essay used in the show "López Oliva: Without a catalogue", Galería La Acacia, Havana, July 1994]

"Belonging as much to those renown Cuban carnivals as they are to the first artistic experiences of the painter in his youth, masks—present once again—claim the space. But there's the catch: they don't represent, they don't signify. To mask oneself is not to conceal, but rather to recapitulate, to recycle codes, but without necessarily rendering homage to the original. […] The mask rules these works, like a feeling […]."

— Jorge R. Bermúdez
Chair of the Conrado Massaguer Department
of Graphic Design and Journalism
University of Havana

[Source: article titled "De catedrales y máscaras", Revista Opus Habana: Oficina del Historiador de la Ciudad de la Habana, Vol. III: No. 1, 1999]

"His works impress one with their subtlety, with the borders of certain ideals that strive to improve the human condition, in frank opposition to opportunism and frivolity. From here derives their ambivalence, the toying with appearances that obscures the pictorial space and that makes of the proscenium a simulacrum (of both reality and of the work itself) in accordance with the postconceptual logic of contemporary art."

— Nelson Herrera Ysla
Art Critic, Poet and Curator of the Wilfredo Lam Center for Contemporary Art

[Source: article "Otra vuelta de pintura", Artecubano: Revista de Artes Visuales, Vols. 2-3, 2002]