There were flowers, in bunches or solitary, to which one might have wanted to give poetic names and unfamiliar symbols. In those fiery bouquets, nothing evoked the blue flower of sentimental romanticism. The crimson flowers that Jim Amaral drew in the late seventies had large teeth. It wasn't that they were necessarily carnivorous or that they belonged to the orchid family and displayed the eroticism of the world in their forms. To tell the truth, no one ever knew… What is certain is that Jim Amaral gave the flowers their own language, a language that was perhaps precisely his own. He had given them a sad and carefree harbor, but these flowers told a story, evoked desires and extraordinary adventures, as if they had escaped from an Edgar Allan Poe poem. For a long time they remained silent, and now, by giving them a face, Jim also gave them a voice and a song. They spoke of life and whispered of love, murmured about the pleasures of the body, and it was all like a strange orchestra stretching from page to page—an orchestra the artist carefully arranged in a beautiful box closed with silk ribbons. It was around 1979, and Jim was working in Paris. He had frequented André Pieyre de Mandiargues and Isabelle d'Este; poetry flowed from his pen, secret and uninhibited.
After the flowers with which he sowed that beautiful garden came the fruit. Life is made in such a way that it stubbornly marches toward its destiny. Yet something had changed in the Garden of Eden, and to represent a new atmosphere, Jim adopted a more somber palette of ochres and sienna. At first, to make the transition, he sketched a few paintings he called Dried Fruits. One could still find in them pieces of bodies, fragments of sex, a whole vocabulary that the artist had worked on for a long time and that made its final appearance here, as if the dry desert wind had seized the plains of desire and love. These Dried Fruits, paintings of meticulous harmony, seemed to revisit from mythology the terrible adventure of Adonis, the unhappy lover of Aphrodite, whom Greek women celebrated even after his death by planting small ephemeral gardens that were quickly doomed by the burning drought of Apollo's sun. Never was a ritual so radically ephemeral and melancholic.
—Jacques Leenhardt, 2021