This article offers a brief study of Joao Cabral de Melo Neto’s process of image construction and — without disregarding the analyses provided in this respect by critics such as Antonio Cândido, Luiz Costa Lima, Haroldo de Campos, Othon Moacyr Garcia and Joao Alexandre Barbosa — it takes as its starting point the discovery of a small collection of materials on bullfighting which the poet started to put together during the period in which he lived in Barcelona in the late 1940s, and which surprisingly would remain intact throughout the poet’s many travels and periods spent living abroad. Stored in a cardboard folder, this collection remained forgotten on the top of a wardrobe at his home in Rio de Janeiro right up to his death, in 1999. Strictly speaking, it comes as no news that Joao Cabral de Melo Neto had a deep interest in Spanish culture. This would grow, of course, thanks to the periods he spent in Barcelona and Seville and it would remain an important reference in his writing career, not only in themes, but in rhythms, structure, make-up and development of his poetic work. Indeed, what this find seems to demonstrate relates not only to Cabral’s relationship with Spain, something he frequently referred to, but equally to a dialogue (so far generally overlooked) between the poet and dissident wings within the surrealist movement (in particular the group around the journal Documents, later congregating around Andre Breton and the publication Minotaure) and a figural method which, like the art of bullfighting, would have as its basic formulations the definition of places of contact, the calculated use of processes of (self-)development and concentric circles, the tension between an aesthetic of the bodily gesture and the language of geometry, between lucidity and intensity, between displacement and approximation, the production of distances and situations of defiance and confrontation. This article will not, therefore, simply reiterate a repertoire of images and themes which are known to feature in Cabral’s work, by revisiting them through the items found in the collection, but it will consider them from a different perspective. Thus, it will consider such a repertoire as visible manifestation of a