E P I L O G U E My father's work B Y D I E G O A M A R A L C E B A L L O S T     about a great artist who, due to inscru- table cosmic design, happens to be my father and with whom I share not only a pool of genes but also an implacable awe in the face of existence. is book is long overdue because it comes in the twilight of his life, but also because it opens its pages to the world at the very moment when the artistic values of his youth are fighting for their life beneath the feverish —though aseptic— froth of contemporary art. And yet, thanks to the eternal irony of life, this lateness now has the virtue of making these multiple and intricate worlds glow with greater intensity and pertinence . So here we find... e world of pearly gessos and sharp strokes of graphite where modern alienation cohabits with the ruins of classical Western my- thology and where words vanish under images of touch, emojis of sensual experience and desire. Or that other globe inscribed with china ink and watercolor drawings —of therapeutic line— that trace hieroglyphs of people who question the mystery of their sexual identity and that so inci- sively predict the cacophony of alter egos and selfies that populate today’s social networks. Or that planet where chimerical plants and flowers grow, the viability of which, in this age of  and the genetic Pandora, no longer seems so far-fetched. Or the world with a tenuous sun in which only silenced fruits exist —like fossils on pedestals—, glimmering darkly with longing for what they once were, like solitary souls in their denatured and urban old age. Or that wandering star inhabited by bronze figures, weighted with ciphered poems, texts, textures and paraphernalia, that seek the heart of time in the Elysian Fields of the universe just as our space probes map the rings of Saturn, the red spot of Jupiter, the frozen seas of Titan or the geography of the sun’s corona. Or those desolate worlds reached only by his latest and sonorous infernal machines, contraptions of absurd geometry and unknown Facing page: . Head and Wheel, × × cm, bronze (detail; see p. „…). EPILOGUE Jim Amaral at work in his country house, El Cedral, December Ž‘ ’.