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He was born in Naples, a city of art and strong passions. He combined his passion for painting and drawing with his studies, first by attending the Art Institute of Naples and then the IED European Institute of Design in Rome, specializing in the field of illustration. It was in the capital city that he began working as an illustrator, creating illustrations, storyboards, animations, and shooting boards for major advertising agencies and Italian and European production companies, signing some of the most important advertising campaigns (Nissan, Alitalia, Telecom, etc.). Since 1997, he has been delving into the digital realm in its various forms: illustrations, photo editing, 3D images, and animation. He served as the creative director and digital artist at Olivastudio before, and currently at Pixelheads Studio. He is also a professor of digital animation at the NABA New Academy of Fine Arts. After many years in the digital world, he felt the need to get his hands dirty with paint again, to touch what he creates and smell its scent. That's why he started painting again.

His art moves between figurative and abstract, in a beautiful and free exploration through portraits, landscapes, and "images of contemporaneity," works depicting a contemporary society completely engulfed by digital and social tools. The artist seems to paint them almost like photographic "snapshots" that characterize one of the main poetic strands of Oliva's art. The characters appear elusive and not well-identified; they are not personalized but represent symbols of the entire global society whose identity is obscured by the tools they hold. People emptied of their identity by the fictional digital personas they ostentatiously display, distracted in their everyday lives and affections by the virtual reality they have constructed, a parallel reality almost more believable.

In the landscapes, there is a transition from large square canvases with well-defined settings to small rectangular boards where the scenery is only outlined. In many of the landscapes, there is a direct reference to "social canvases" through an exaggerated use of the dripping technique on the lower edge of the canvas. This "dripping post-literam" aims to simulate the incompleteness of the picture and its potential completion in the viewer's imagination.