Baiser (Kiss) is a modernist work in patinated clay, highlighting aspects of a figurative art that explores the ideal of a return to European roots, along the lines proposed by the sculptors Antoine Bourdelle and Aristide Maillol, a trend that gained adherence in Paris in the 1920s.
In the body of Canto da Maya’s work, Baiser was part of a period in which the artist exalted the exuberant and the sensitive, in a search for the essence of the human being. Totally outside the canons, the figures are modelled in clay: the ideal raw material to give shape to the notion of eroticism conveyed by the primitive pair.