BY SANTIAGO LONDOÑO VÉLEZ ments sharply, or playfully explores distinct possibilities to produce objects that integrate painting and sculpture in which the combina- tions of unlikely elements are crucial. In these inventions developed during the same time that he painted Mourning Fruits and subsequent series, Amaral does not seek a hilarious joke but appeals to unconscious reason, to everyday experience, and to intelligence, and subverts the utilitarian postulates of commonly used elements such as tables or chairs. Simultaneously, to accentuate the verity of their existence, he produces the fiction of the perfect artifact: perfect in its design, perfect in its appearance of virtuous faux-fini (false finishes), and perfectly inofficious. e titles are supportive of the final point of the work, as in the case of Walk No More ( ; FIG. 189 ), Chair Giving Birth to the Gray Moon ( ; FIG. 86 ), Narcissus Chairs ( ; FIG. 187 ), A Handy Chair ( ), A Limp Table ( ) and Caryatid’s Table ( ; FIG. 87 ), among others. is diverse group of pieces exists within the grammatical defini- tion of the noun “furniture”: they can be moved, they have rigid forms, and they could furnish or decorate a space. But something in them goes intensely wrong. ey warn us that the unexpected may wait in every- day objects. ey are intended for the actual use of not having a use; that is, for anything but being useless furniture. And in this way he achieves the creation of a sort of Cortazarian discomfort in the face of routine and the established to the point that some of the essence of the Julio Cortazar’s Historias de cronopios and famas seems to feed them. But they also breathe a peculiar sense of Kafkaesque absurdity and horror, ulti- mately becoming a cultured metaphor of uselessness. “ ey are a little ridiculous,” he declared in an interview in , “and offer a challenge because you have to think about whether they are or are not furniture. For example, there is an armchair for a man, in a pyramid shape, used in the Middle Ages for torture.”⁴² According to Moyano Ortiz, … Amaral possesses an inner rebel and his transgressive spirit led him to experiment and he created a long series of useless objects, like talking about the sterility of customs and the absurdity of a sense of purpose in a world with- out enduring values, where everything is consumed at the relentless pace of consumption (sic), in the realm of appearances, in the purgatory of “good tra- ditions.” en he took a risk with furniture and artifacts craftily assembled, proposing symbologies loaded with a fine humor and corrosive irony .⁴³ S C U L P T U R E S After settling in Colombia, Amaral began creating early body of work as a sculptor, since this was his primordial field of interest. ◀  . . Chair Giving Birth to the Gray Moon, “”ž‰. ”ˆ×‰“׌• cm, mixed media. . Caryatid’s Table, “”žž. ŒŒ×‰Œ×‰Œ cm, assemblage.