JIM AMARAL: THE POETICS OF UNCERTAINTY, SEX AND SURREALISM Jim Amaral is an unsung pioneer in the visual presentation of sensuality and sexuality, albeit in its more nuanced and less- er-celebrated permutations. A protean artist, he is capable of manipulating, morphing, and slipping from one medium to the next —drawing, bronze casting, collage, painting, assemblage, printmaking— in order to relentlessly map this delicate terrain. Amaral’s impressive repertoire of work, spanning many decades and materials, constitutes a monument dedicated to the fragility and mutability of desire. He is part of that generation of artists who found themselves profoundly influenced by Surrealism in its later manifestations, but who were also dedicated to making new pictorial and psychological inroads into previously unexplored territories. Born in what is now known as the San Francisco Bay Area, Amaral experienced growing up in rural Pleasanton, California as difficult. He was a sensitive child who found the traditional gender roles of his times and social class restrictive, and in some ways even brutal. Close to his mother, he understood the bur- dens of her tending of the domestic sphere and tried to help her at home. He recalled her being debilitated by nameless fears and anxieties and his empathy with her suffering marked him for life. Discerning that he was somehow “different,” Amaral felt a sense of isolation, compounded by a distant relationship with his fa- ther who, it seemed to him at the time, preferred his more tradi- tionally masculine brother. Whatever the truths were about his childhood, these conflicts and fraught relationships contributed to the formation of an artist who would spend a lifetime ques- tioning and exploring masculinity’s inflexible parameters. Amaral’s parents had aspirations for him to enter a special- ized moneymaking profession such as the practice of law and to this end he attended Stanford University in the early s. Stan- W O R L D I I JimAmaral: The Poetics of Uncertainty, Sex and Surrealism B Y S U S A N A B E R T H It’s not love but love’s outskirts that are worth knowing¹ . Untitled, . × cm, ink on paper. . Untitled, . × cm, ink on paper. Previous page: . Jim at work, .