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On a fateful Good Friday in 1961 Naul Ojeda, fascinated by the mysteries held within the natural beauty of a piece of wood, swore eternal love to this humble medium. With little more than a nail as a tool, but imbued with the tenacity of ancient artisans, he probed and disrobed the wood of its splinters, knots, textures, and forms, bringing to life his first woodcut.

At that time he was a student in the School of Fine Arts at the University of Uruguay, and within a year his work was shown in the "First Exhibition of Graphic Art of Latin America" in Havana, Cuba. After graduation four years later, he readied a backpack, holding little more than his carving tools and the non-conformist attitude of the generation of the 60s, and set off to continue liberating images caught in the grain and knots of the beautiful woods he found on the remote pathways and fantasy like villages across the lands of Latin America. Print after print came forth stamped with his particular vision of "magic realism." A societal imperative of that period, in science, commerce, education, and other fields, including the arts, was of permanent pilgrimage, of exploration. Among creative individuals who were often identified as backpackers and hippies, there was the added exigency of communication through their art. During his travels through countries of Latin America, Ojeda adapted his technique to his nomadic life style and hand printing became a hallmark of his work.

In 1967 he returned to Uruguay as a mature artist with a wealth of experiences. He won the First Prize for Prints in his country that year and the government awarded him a trip to Europe to further expand his horizons by working in the ateliers of renowned French printmakers. Throughout all these travels, Ojeda never let up on his artistic production. In the most adverse circumstances in remote places of Latin America, he always had a few tools to carve his images and a spoon to print the treasures revealed in discarded wood.

After a year in France, he returned to find a climate of political agitation in Latin America that decidedly influenced his artistic trajectory. He was invited to participate in the Bienal of Graphic Art in Santiago, Chile in 1969, coincidently with Salvador Allende's rise to power as the first democratically elected socialist president in the world. Ojeda, with his innate social sensibility, was taken by the short-lived Chilean experiment that shattered in 1973 with the coups d'etat. Neighboring countries of Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil also had come under the rule of military dictatorships. Ojeda's name was on the "black lists" that circulated in military intelligence services, and he had the questionable distinction of figuring on the "list of foreigners killed" during the military coup in Santiago.

Ojeda fled Chile, devising a clandestine means to remove his artwork, and began an unforgiving pilgrimage through Latin American countries in search of a climate of liberty and tolerance to express himself. Mexico was a temporary stop, and in 1974 the United States opened its doors to him. Ojeda arrived with the baggage of his life experiences and artistic work - 15 exhibitions in 8 countries and nostalgia for the vitality, magic and poetry of Latin America.