Jim Amaral
Throughout his career, Amaral has explored diverse paths and techniques in the development of his creative process, which has resulted in a work that is unclassifiable among the prevailing trends of national and Latin American art. His work is characterized by its originality, its independence from the geographical context, his technical mastery and his insistence on delving into the development of a mysterious iconography of the expressions of the unconscious, created from his inner drives and his most intimate existential concerns. His pieces express a restlessness to unveil the mystery of the human being: a mixture between the earthly and the divine, a need for protection and defense, and a search for identity that borders between the masculine and the feminine.
Although his work has a local adaptation of international movements such as abstraction and expressionism, Amaral has kept his work outside the avant-garde by applying techniques that he has modified and adapted for his own aesthetic purposes. In this way, he has managed to achieve a language of his own and a poetic universe, characterized by his extraordinary talent for craftsmanship and his taste for materials. His perfectionist character is reflected in his work as a goldsmith: Amaral builds small bronze pieces in which he mixes antique objects with modern elements that he incorporates himself. As a sculptor, he presents disproportionate bodies that at the same time reflect the beauty and a surprising aesthetic sensibility. As a draftsman and painter, he has freely developed the concept of eroticism, the masculine and the feminine, and has updated his stance on the liberation of sexuality from the confines of convention, traditional tropes and definitions of the past.
As Amaral ages, he seems to work harder, with more joy and confidence. The coexistence of his early figurative work with abstract works can be understood when considering that figuration and abstraction are, for the artist, the two sides of the same coin that correspond to thought and sensations. In this regard, Amaral stated: "I lean towards figurativism, but I believe very much in both values. I can't say that one is worth more than the other because each has its own very solid artistic bases˝
