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sky, in contrast to what you feel as you move towards the jungle, where life and death are present cheek by jowl, and light vanishes with the wild advance of nature, with its capacity to resist human order. The whole weight of the universe seems to rest on the void of the circle drawn by the village, in the same way that it seems to bear down with the weight of the Indian who dances bent over the ground. The drawings made in Xingu started as quick records of the exoticism of appearances, gradually becoming ‘layouts‘ that attempted to capture their movement. The idea of copying or imitation gives way to a desire to become a part of the movement, rather than to record it. Yet this is the word’s eternal pursuit of a definition for what is felt. I repeat: of what is felt, an expression I prefer to feeling, a word that seems to immediately restrict itself to the search for a conclusion. The advantage of the image over the word? Everyone sees what they want.” Pomar’s drawings explore the language of the body, underlining the expressive potential of the rapid line. They are communicative, they catalogue and bear witness to the primordiality of life in the Amazon jungle. They explore the world of relations, feelings, ways of life. These drawings are a “certificate of presence”, to use Barthe’s expression about photography’s protocols of truth, a quality that sometimes becomes more important than the idea itself or the representational endeavour that arises from it. The idea of performance precedes each drawing. Each series of drawings implies a time of interaction, of relation and a compositional endeavour that is not restricted to the moment, to that which remains and leaves the framing. And writing about these drawings, like writing about photography, implies – to cite Barthes once more – “the uneasiness of being a subject torn between two languages, one expressive, the other critical; and at the heart of this critical language, between several discourses, those of sociology, of semiology, and of psychoanalysis”8. What is meant by this is that the visual experience that Júlio Pomar offers, through these drawings, emphasises the idea of a work as a complex artistic fact, intersected by different variants, which enable numerous questions to be raised about the image, about culture, about memory, about truth and its protocols in the realm of representation – “I owe you the truth in painting”, wrote Cézanne in a letter, dated 3 October 1905, to Émile Bernard. What truth? One might respond perhaps: the same truth that is delivered by each of these drawings. They emphasise what photography always seems to carry with it, their referent, in other words, affected by a certain “amorous or 8 Barthes, Roland, Camera Lucida: Reflections of Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981) p. 7.