Artworks

Man the wingless being, with flights of fancy. No-men anchored to the subconscious and to genetic memory; castaways of past civilizations which haunt our present daughters, sons and future fathers, castaways on earth asking the same questions about the moon, the suns, the stars. Jim Amaral’s creative output has dwelled on these unfathomable questions for forty years with manic intensity; be it through drawings and gouaches that sought to pierce the mystery of sex; be it with melancholy paintings dealing with the slow ebb and tide of thought, growth, maturity and inevitable decay; be it with absurd and contradictory decor —twisted tables, unusable chairs, fidgeting furniture; be it with ink and watercolor drawings on the ironies and follies of the human erotic condition. After all, Amaral returned to bronze in 1989 as an exile returns to his homeland. Objects are now seeded with past experience to become sculptures born with beingness; forlorn, unsatisfied nomads in our technological age aspiring to heroic dimensions but caught by wheels, pointed shoes, spheres and circles and the trappings of everyman. They are our musings and dusty anxieties fleshed out in colored bronze. No smooth glossy, slick surfaces here but the surreal, complex texture of life itself spiralling towards oblivion, watching out for more life. When we turn away from one of these witnesses, the jury is out, the waves bless our feet and we somehow come to terms to what is so deep inside our being.

—Diego Amaral,
Jim Amaral: No-men, bronces. Peyton Wright Gallery, Santa Fe,
Nuevo México, Estados Unidos (octubre de 2002).