JIM AMARAL: THE VISIONARY is a word —or a new sound. Do not look, and neither believe: every- thing is dark,” Fernando Pessoa has said. And thus, as the mythical Greek statue lost its original power and was converted into art when its culture was attacked, and as all the accumulation of religious figures again caused awe with the eruption of the Renaissance, being earth converted into profane expression —whose legitimacy depended only on the mirrors propitiated by art—, Amaral, on the other hand, will appear to be stubborn enough to sacralize our future with a new sect of personalities in bronze, born in time immemorial and still capable of listening to the first sounds of the universe, of seeing the first sparkle of existential dawn, and that give the conviction that in the future, if we are so disposed and if we come over to our own imaginaries, we will recuperate all of this extinct mystery. “ at the gods on Judgment Day raise themselves up before the forms that were living in the city of statues! It is not the world of man that they have created, which will give testimony to their presence, it will be that of the artists. All art is a lesson for its gods,” as André Mal- raux says genially in e Voices of Silence , a dazzling thought evoking the heritage of civilizations and that acknowledges in the vast chorus of images of culture an act of giving thanks to the most diverse deities, and when it is possible to reveal them, the fascinating: the eclipse of mythologies… Just as art invents gods, any transformation in its symbolic percep- tion, in the arc that delimits its creations in a singular historical period, will be able to wipe them out under the reign of a god-killing power that is irreducible. First we see how the gods convert themselves into sculptures and how icons again became images that no longer responded to any cult but an aesthetic one and little more than a century later, guided by the Impressionists, warned us in a surprising way of the flight of col- or from figures, their release from objects that were limited by draw- ing, inaugurating the pictorial emancipation of contemporary art. We are also thus witness to the self-destruction of perspective, refined by the masters of the Renaissance, when Cubism led a regression to the two-dimensional. And, later, living through the dominion of paradox- es, we see how painting again became texture, material, relief, thus ap- proximating the universe of sculpture. In a complementary fashion we were lookouts for the geometrization of sculpture and later surprised ourselves with the exploration of cinematic art (thinking ahead to Al- exander Calder) —a paradoxical search, since sculpture had been con- nected for millennia to immobility. . Branched, €‚‚‚. ‰‰”׎‰×Ž‰ cm, bronze (detail; see p.€ƒ”).