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Introduction

Naul Ojeda is one of the truly distinguished printmakers of Latino heritage in the United States and in the field of woodcuts the most outstanding young Latino artist following in the tradition of Frasconi, Homar and Amighetti. When the graphics work of the 1970's and 1980's is finally digested by the caudillos of Art History, certain works and artists will remain imprinted indelibly in our memories for their exceptional quality, idealism, political belief, and lyricism -- Rupert Garcia, Amado Pena (in his early 1970's political work in silkscreens), and in the medium of the woodcut -- Naul Odeja.

We are proud to present this retrospective of 25 years of work of Naul Ojeda as the 16th Anniversary exhibition in honor of the founding of Fondo del Sol Visual Arts and Media Center -- Washington's first artist run Latino cultural museum. In his moving and wonderful work Naul sands as a symbol, for all his fellow Latino artists in the greater Washington area, of uncompromising quality and a new meaning and vision in the world of the woodcut.

Marc Zuver
Director, Fondo del Sol
May, 1989

The late noted Latin American art historian Marta Traba aptly characterized his work in a 1980 catalogue essay:

Ojeda's world keeps on being that universe of simple elements envisioned by the master Torres Garcia as "constructive universalism." The sun and the moon are constant themes, but so are man and woman, fish and house, city and sea. Only, in Ojeda's works, these pieces are not manipulated as segments of a secret language. On the contrary, that drifting afloat derived from his nostalgia imparts a certain color, the ambiguousness of things lost and found, things that though never completely lost are never quite found either. This general atmosphere, however, does not detract clarity from his forms. Ojeda develops well the symbolic desire to achieve a concrete image for amorphous ideas: the indefiniteness of love, the uncertainty of our place on earth, the preeminence of poetry and beauty, woman's apparition. These are all expressed in keys that have the virtue of refreshing and recodifying the old metaphors. Ojeda's works are praiseworthy, attracting the spectator glutted by the incomprehensible, ever more in need of a sanitation of images and the practice of a certain visual ecology.