BY EDUARDO SERRANO eir sober yet varied hues of paint give them a powerful, severe presence, a certain mysterious air of objects that survived some fascinating history related to ritual and solemn spaces. A T I M E L E S S O L Y M P U S Finally, in the late eighties,Amaral started working in bronze again, and one can imagine his elation at the prospect of devoting him- self to this after being frustrated by circumstances for so long.⁸ He went to work in a more suitable foundry than the one he went to originally, which he discovered on a trip to an exhibition of his wife’s work in Tesuque, a small town near Santa Fe, New Mexico. ere was an excellent workshop linked to the Shidoni Gallery, with which Amaral quickly established a fruitful relationship. He was soon sending them his figures in wax for casting, packed in boxes that looked like coffins. Given the vicissitudes of the trip, however, the figures suffered serious damage, so the artist decided to station himself in New Mexico for short peri- ods of time in order to be able to intervene in every stage of the development of the pieces. With this break, working in bronze was no longer just a pos- sibility but a reality, one rooted in a studio with experience in this kind of work and in possession of the materials and the people qual- ified to execute it. His knowledge and expertise gradually increased to the point where he was making the most important modern fig- urative sculpture produced in Colombia. is work transmitted not only an artistic but a worldly wisdom and can be compared to Gi- acometti’s sculpture with respect to its faith in figuration as a valid and fertile language for modern three-dimensional art. I had the good fortune of visiting Amaral in the studio and seeing for myself his enthusiasm for the environment and the work. He was submerged among the molds and ovens, model- ing pieces on huge tables, learning from the experts what was required for optimal casting, experimenting with different radi- ant patinas on more or less anthropomorphic figures that were becoming increasingly diverse and increasingly utopian: person- ifications of mythical characters somewhere between the attrac- tive and the alarming and which triggered fabulous stories in the imagination, legends that each viewer could develop in accor- dance with their own experiences and visions. It was precisely in the Shidoni Gallery that Amaral exhibited the fruit of his labors in New Mexico. e pieces varied in size, . Moonwatcher , ƒ. ‹€×ƒ†×† cm, bronze. Moonwatcher , ƒ. ‹€×ƒ × cm, bronze. . Sarcophagus: Male Torso Fragment , ‡. ‹ ׆ × ‹ cm, bronze. Sarcophagus: Female Torso Fragment , ‚. „†×†‹× ‡ cm, bronze.