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SATURDAY, MAY 27, 1989 ...R

The Washington Post
Style

Galleries: Naul Ojeda's woodcuts at Fondo del Sol

Ojeda's Floating Reveries

By Jo Ann Lewis
Washington Post Staff Writer

    In 1969, artist and printmaker Naul Ojeda, then 30, left his native Uruguay to participate in the international Biennial of Graphic Arts in Santiago, Chile. He did not return.
     Working as a press photographer, he became involved in the campaign to elect Chilean President Salvador Allende, and remained in Santiago until the 1973 coup. Via Argentina and Mexico, Ojeda finally made his way to Washington, where - with an early assist from dealer Franz Bader - his bold black and white woodcuts of floating lovers, vivid suns and moons, birds and animals and ocean liners swiftly placed him among the city's most distinctive and accomplished graphic artists. 
     He is still all that and more, as the 25-year-retrospective of Ojeda's woodcuts and linocuts now at Fondo del Sol reminds us.
      What the show does not offer, however, is what Ojeda needs most: curatorial selectivity and focus that would clarify his true accomplishment. In fact, he is a Latin American Chagall, whose tender, floating reveries of home, of separation, displacement and reunion give unique and poetic visual form to the late 20th-century immigrant experience — something most of us remain woefully oblivious to.
      Here, from the moment we enter, we sense the anxieties, difficulties and joys of that experience in woodcuts like "Immigrants" and "Long Awaited Reunion," which the artist made in 1976 in anticipation of seeing his daughter after years of separation. We see them still in the ambivalence expressed in more recent prints, such as "Questioning" and "Dreams of Return," which describe in highly imaginative, episodic narratives, the persistent tugs between freedom and home. 
      But these images are, in the end, always lyrical, their subtlety, originality and universality setting them well apart from mainstream Latin American art. He is never heavy-handed or polemical, even when he deals with political subjects like "Fall of the Generals," which he handles with extraordinary detachment, even whimsy.
      Fickle fashion seems to have turned against the small-edition hand-pulled print in recent years, but interest is bound to be whetted by gems like "Woman in the Headboard," the figure of a sleeping woman ingeniously cut and printed from the headboard of a real bed. This and other wood blocks from which the prints are pulled (in editions of 25 or fewer) are also included in the show, which continues through June 10. Several prints are still available at astonishingly low prices.
__________________
Naul Ojeda- Twenty-Five Years:
1963-1988, at Fondo del Sol Visual
Arts Center, 2112 R St. NW, through
June 10. Hours are Tuesday through
Saturday, 12:30 to 5:30

[[image: someone laying on a fish looking up at a bird in a moon as the fish floats over buildings and birds]] Naul Ojeda's woodcut "Dreams of Return" at Fondo del Sol.