JIM AMARAL: THE VISIONARY inconclusive, as if its author wished to tell us that the part of the draw- ing that corresponds to fog, or each spectral wisp that gives shape to his enigmatic still lifes, or the negation of features that characterize his sculptures, belong to forgetting, to miscommunication, or to death. ere is something of the metaphysical in his sculptural pieces, as in his oils, while in his fantastic drawings the sensual, or the figurative emancipation of sexuality, seem to dominate; and if in various of his graphic series the oneiric reigns, in the Freudian sense, in others the ludic is plausible —or, to be more exact, the Circean— as occurs in his creations of the last two decades. If in his sculptures and paintings the tragic spirit displays itself, lyricism or playfulness find their own dominion in his drawings, and it is there where the metaphor described in the previous pages makes itself categorical, from which this divided artist works always with one hand in dusk and one in dawn. e irony of the dream of completeness that inhabits his carnal Landscapes of the s reveals a body taken over by an outbreak of symbolic zones, like a dance of erogenous sunbeams. In his Invisible Flowers ( - ; FIGS. 63 68 and 285 ), drawn like a secret homage to the botanical engravings of the eighteenth century —previews of a refined trajectory, where the colors green and red find themselves in ceaseless dialogue—we see the humble pencil and a sub- tle acrylic carry us to a surreal territory in which fingers, vulvas, phal- luses, breasts, and eyes invent an atmosphere that seems to be rocked by the wind. e plants hybridize with the more sexualized zones of the human being and transform themselves into carnivorous flowers; and if here through the work of a magical link some regions of the body graft themselves onto plants, some of his sculptures, as we mentioned at the start, are human bodies that sprout again, that struggle to give birth to a tree. is conjunction of carnivorous flowers, of roses whose corolla is the feminine sex, of fragments of masculine sexuality, shows itself to us as a secret guide to a botany of fantasy, where stamens and pistils hold a germinal power. Here the most sensitive zones of the human being are elevated to flowers, to petals, to leaves, and our empty naturalism encounters its vegetal dream. In Amaral focused his drawings on the theme of Narcissus, who, according to the myth as told by the Roman poet Publio Ovidio Nasón, as a beautiful young noblemen believed that he would become old “if he did not know himself,” which did not happen because at the surprise of seeing his own image in the water he swooned with desire and ended up transformed into a flower with a red center and white . Invisible Flower, Plates ‰• and €•, ‰‹”‹. Š”וƒ cm each, pencil and watercolor on paper.