JIM AMARAL: THE VISIONARY O F P O E T R Y I N A R T If the essential quest of art is poetry and the whole of the aesthetic corpus is a refined stratagem to capture this disturbing and elusive visitor, the work of JimAmaral would be one of its climactic scenes. If poetry is for some the highest human expression, the sublime ambit in which the invisible makes itself visible, and for others the apotheosis of a luminous mystery, or, in a more categorical form, “the objective of our species,” as Joseph Brodsky defines it, then to set out on a visit to the sculptural land established by Amaral, a land whose creatures are possessed by a magical paralysis, and to contemplate the lunar paintings native to this land of sadness, would be to accept with- out doubt some disquieting revelations. Because if we believe that the only legitimate option for the artist is to make poetry, not to capture an “aesthetic” canon nor to repeat the common forms of the beautiful, of the expected ornamentation, then the construction of a ruse of vertigoes and visions that fertilize the po- etic and fosters its telluric ontology is imposed on any true creator of form... “Much more than a form of knowledge, poetry is first of all a way of life, of life as a whole,” affirmed Saint-John Perse in his speech after receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in . Certainly this sublime manifestation does not trail along after knowledge, although its irides- cent unfolding does dialogue with wisdom on many occasions. Poetry is, as the lauded poet from Guadalupe asserts, a possibility of real ex- istence, and to imagine a world without poetry would be to conceive of an impoverished, mute, opaque, predictable territory in which not even the risk of ambiguity would exist. Poetry surges up from the fog of our unconscious, more than from the lightning bolts of reason, and from there its rebellious song rises, its unveiling of realities, its interior assault. Poetry brings out strange and fruitful spaces between words, images, melodies, silences, capable of disrupting the comfort of the domesticated flow of our thought, and from this comes its liberating power. Poetry has raised the sacred, has translated silence, has inspected being, made a pact with the shadow, W O R L D I V JimAmaral: The Visionary B Y G O N Z A L O M Á R Q U E Z C R I S T O . Jim Amaral and Gonzalo Márquez Cristo, . Previous spread . Jim’s studio, .