Le Baiser Nacré (The Mother-of-Pearl Kiss)

Le Baiser Nacré, "the pearly kiss" or "the mother-of-pearl kiss," is a tabletop sculpture by Yves Pirès, a French sculptor who works in bronze and resin and sells mainly through galleries and online art platforms. It is cast in a pearlescent white resin and stands about 31 cm high and 20 cm wide. Like most of Pirès's resin pieces, it appears to have been produced in a numbered edition rather than as a single original, so there is no one "location" for the work.

What you're looking at

The sculpture is a fragment: two figures cut off below the chest, fused into a single compact form and lifted on a transparent acrylic post so that the group seems to float. The man, on the left, bends his head down to kiss the woman, his hair rendered in deep, wave-like grooves. She tilts her face up to meet him, eyes closed, her short hair swept back. Her right hand rests on his shoulder at the back of his neck; her left is drawn up between their bodies, fingers spread against his chest, while his hand cradles her head from behind.

What makes the piece work is the tangle of arms. There are four hands, and they are placed so that the eye keeps circling the group: from his hand on her nape, to her hand on his shoulder, to the two hands pressed between them. The truncation at the bottom, a smooth sweeping cut rather than a straight base, adds to the sense of two bodies emerging from a single block.

The nacré finish gives the surfaces a soft sheen, closer to porcelain or shell than to marble. Highlights slide across the shoulders and cheeks, and the deeper hollows, between the faces and under the arms, stay cool and gray.

Tradition

The motif of the half-length embracing couple descends from Auguste Rodin's The Kiss (1882) and from the many reductions and variants it inspired, in which the figures emerge from rough or truncated stone. Pirès's version is smoother and more decorative, closer to Art Deco and modern commercial sculpture than to Rodin's unfinished surfaces. For classical kisses in marble, compare Psyche Revived by Cupid's Kiss by Antonio Canova, and for paint, The Kiss by Francesco Hayez.

About the artist

Little has been published about Yves Pirès beyond gallery listings, which describe him as a figurative sculptor of human bodies and animals working in limited editions of bronze and resin. Older pages on this site gave the date "1958," which is unconfirmed and may refer to the artist rather than the work. See also Famous Sculptures.