JIM AMARAL TRANS/FIGURATIONS P R E A M B L E Forty years after his first solo exhibition in Colombia ( ), where he settled in , JimAmaral has created a body of work nearly unclas- sifiable by the prevailing tendencies in national and Latin American art. Owner of a characteristic plastic universe, he stands out through his indisputable originality, marginalization of the vanguards, an in- dependence from geographic context, love for materials, technical mastery, and persistence in delving into the creation of an unsettling iconography stemming from his deepest existential preoccupations. Issues such as a rupture with academia, the expression of nation- ality and social conflicts, the search for the Latin American and for particular cultural roots, the attraction exerted by Picasso and the Mexican muralists, as well as the extensive program of local assimi- lation and adaptation of international movements such as abstraction and expressionism, are common themes in Colombian art of the twen- tieth century. Yet they are altogether foreign to this artist. Born in and exposed during his formative years to the leadingNorthAmerican cultural currents, he initially investigated opposite expressive tenden- cies simultaneously, as dictated by his search for a language, that is to say, of an identity, as an artist and as a human being, which since his childhood he found within the space of his own internal exile. Amaral has a unique, vital reason in art, a means of salvation, where his sensibility, imagination and introspective capacity materialize, apply- ing techniques that he has modified and adapted for his own purposes as a cultured and refined esthete. rough these he has constituted, letter by letter, the strictly and rigorously personal code language of a solitary voice that consolidates itself in exquisite executions, thanks to his ex- traordinary artisanal capacity and his reveling in materials. To go beyond form, to modify and transgress it, to explore the possibilities of movement from one thing to another, through anal- ogies, similes, comparisons, correspondences, hybridizations syn- aesthesia, transpositions and metaphors, these have been to Amaral —a sensualist convinced that consciousness necessarily involves the senses— the indispensable way to excavate his interior, not as a for- *Essay from the retrospecitve exhibition catalogue Jim Amaral. Trans/figuraciones - . Bogotá, Banco de la República, Biblioteca Luis Ángel Arango, November ‡ˆˆ‰-February ‡ˆˆŒ. W O R L D I JimAmaral Trans/figurations 1964-2004 * B Y S A N T I A G O L O N D O Ñ O V É L E Z . Jim drawing, “”•“. Previous page . Retrospective exhibition, Biblioteca Luis Ángel Arango, ‡ˆˆ‰-‡ˆˆŒ.