Jim Amaral: Soliloquies Sculptures

Jim Amaral, his sculptural habitat

One approaches the sculpture of Jim Amaral and observes how static, how silent they are. But at the slightest distraction, upon returning our glance to them, just like Lot’s wife, the observer becomes static: their volumes and shadows have changed; they have acquired autonomous movement. Being the mutant living things that they are, amphibious in their androgeny; his sculptures attain this visual effect.

They are beings swathed by the moon. Moon watchers and winged men surrounded by an atmosphere of mystery spawned by a patina on their bronze bodies. Like a dream.
A superlative ingredient in the work of Jim Amaral has to do with the way it is archaic and contemporary at once, old and new, as in the case of all major art leaving a trace between times.

Thus, there are evocations in the Orpheus of Pyras, to his static and aesthetic nudity, to an entire mythological background.

This characteristic of his to join different times seems to work an unconscious metaphor about the ancient age that encompassed a dozen generations.

—Juan Manuel Roca, 1990 [Extracto de texto].