Jim Amaral: The Poetics of Uncertainty, Sex and Surrealism
Jim Amaral is an unsung pioneer in the visual presentation of sensuality and sexuality, albeit in its more nuanced and lesser-celebrated permutations. A protean artist, he is capable of manipulating, morphing, and slipping from one medium to the next —drawing, bronze casting, collage, painting, assemblage, printmaking— in order to relentlessly map this delicate terrain. Amaral’s impressive repertoire of work, spanning many decades and materials, constitutes a monument dedicated to the fragility and mutability of desire. He is part of that generation of artists who found themselves profoundly influenced by Surrealism in its later manifestations, but who were also dedicated to making new pictorial and psychological inroads into previously unexplored territories.
— Susan L. Aberth, 2016 [Text excerpt].
Jim Amaral’s prodigious oeuvre will provide future scholars with much to ponder. utilizing some of the psychological process- es and interests of the Surrealists, he has managed to update their radical stance on liberating sexuality from the confines of conven- tion. Working in historic parallel to the feminist movement, he has sought to explore masculinity, freeing it from the stale tropes and definitions of the past. Negating the negative associations of the phallus with aggression and dominance, he has used it instead to express tenderness, confusion, and vulnerability. In his world men express their “feminine” side with great abandon and pleasure, at times deciding to inhabit both worlds. Amaral has been a pioneer in heralding a new age, a time when future generations can freely experiment with or assume whatever gender identity or desire they care to. His decades of unceasing psychological self-examination, artistic experimentation, and disciplined hard work have resulted in a multivalent vision that will be understood with ever-increasing appreciation in the future.
— Susan L. Aberth, 2016 [Text excerpt].
