BY GONZALO MÁRQUEZ CRISTO sence of poetry is the establishment of truth,” as the philosopher Mar- tin Heidegger claims, an incisive thought that legitimizes an incursion into the work of Jim Amaral. It is enough to contemplate one of his Sphinxes ( - ; FIGS. 111 112 , 256 257 and 259 261 ) to be surprised at sculpture occurring as poetry and to reveal the tormented experience that leads its author to erect one of the most significant aesthetic uni- verses of our illusory time. Consequently, if “art is that which puts truth into the work,” as the great German thinker surmised, then here we have the verification of this penetrating idea, where the miracle that makes it possible to unveil being and at the same time discover Nothing, according to the process described by Heidegger, inhabits these magnificent creations. ere is something of the visionary in an aesthetic orb that pur- sues the recovery of the origin or the installation of a post-apocalyptic future in its creations, that describes the future with the patina of the past, attaining the nothing that opens itself and exposes us to the vo- racity of our inexorable pathos . us the crestfallen or dejected figures, which show themselves below the signs of their isolation, produce in the contemplator the same sensation that manifests itself when we ad- mire the ruins of Pompeii, because in a similar way to the violent work of lava, the interior destruction and opprobrium that universalizes the human condition makes its indelible mark in Amaral’s bronzes. Because whoever approaches his aesthetic universe opens himself first of all to a horde of cosmic travelers who have decided to eternal- ize themselves in his creations but separate themselves from the alien imagination, confronted with a legion of tortured and persecuted souls and with the victims of dis-communication and silence. His works may emanate from the sidereal future, but they are more precisely the proof of a source time lost in the shadows of our past, pur- sued at the mercy of the contrivances of the unconscious and of the ex- ercise that bequeaths to us the prodigious return to the infancy of the image and, surely, the dawn of ritual; because the true artist is always born too early —we might tell ourselves— carrying millenniums on his shoulders or a bale of buried suns from which he extracts his visions... Amaral aims without hope for the return of cosmic dialogue. His images are previews of an unfathomable muteness which at times flaunt enigmatic messages tattooed on the skin in a not-yet-invented language, always producing in a hair-raising way the certainty that the urgent re- sponse will never produce. e time of the origin and the time that will come seem to unite themselves here, or, better, to fertilize nostalgia for an inaugural period that still contains our galactic communion. . Sphinx № , . ×× cm, bronze.