Inheritor of this imaginary unfurling and connoisseur of the work of gods that art has been, Amaral, like a seer of our time on his soli- tary quest, decided to annex to the immobility inherent in this plastic manifestation that he cultivated in bronze some mobile elements al- ready mentioned, such as wheels, doors, and wings, which before all else allow him to listen to the profound sound of the bronze, granting his pieces an air of millenarian grandeur, a distinctive fea- ture, one that, thanks to its green and blue patinas, makes us believe, when we are lucky enough to contem- plate them, that we find ourselves in front of the totems of the future. “It seems that we are creating solid riches, strong, beautiful, but we are really construct- ing images,” averred Walt Whitman in a verse that is impossible to object to here. en what is art, if not a collection of images that define the dialogue of being human with everything that may transcend it? And as we can affirm that the artist is the scribe of dreams, the custodian of the collective imagination, these creations are then the testimony to a freedom not only formal but one that breaks the dams that subjugate thought. In this epoch, which in its wish to expand hegemonic mechanisms of regulation and to support an inhuman dogma of results has excluded poetry for being the only manifestation possible to subjugate, it is no- table that an artist born in California and established in Bogotá for five decades still persists in looking for this spiritual miracle of the poetic in his shocking plastic works, with persistent will and with great distance from any collective aesthetic consideration, and who shows himself to be more contemporary with the anonymous Assyrian artists of antiq- uity or the makers of the fascinating statues of Easter Island than with the artists of his own generation. Silence, the strange deity without a name that so many mythol- ogies have disowned, would now be able to have its effigy, thanks to Amaral’s pantheon of expectant beings. In the silent introspection of these plastic manifestations little has been established as evident. But here it is necessary to reflect that, like Buddhist statuary —if we trust in what is expressed through its lips— it contains a silence that is the silence of wisdom; and if the Greek sculptures contain the silence of self-absorption, while Egyptian art expresses immortality through its muteness, these sculptures that now understand us, devoid of eyes, ears, noises, mouths, and including hands (although when these appear . Branch Surround, €‚‚€. ‰‰”׎‚.Š×Ž‚.Š cm, bronze (detail; see p.€ƒŒ).