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Commentary

Naúl 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 form 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.

Marta Traba
Latin American Art Historian
October, 1980

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Mundo del Marino, woodcut, 1963