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[[right margin]] for WASHINGTON PRINT CLUB QUARTERLY [[/end right margin]]

Naúl Ojeda: Woodcuts and Linocuts at Washington Printmakers Gallery
by Max-Karl Winkler

All significant art invites us into a world that is at once familiar and foreign. The Washington Printmakers Gallery 2004 Invitational Exhibition, celebrating the life and work of Washington woodcut artist Naúl Ojeda, adds several dimensions to that concept. Ojeda grew to maturity in Uruguay, studied under European-trained masters, and produced a body of work that is unmistakably Latin-American--and very much our own. He spent only the last twenty-five years of his career in the Washington area, yet his stature there was iconic, for he was an activist on several fronts: in civil rights, in human rights generally, and in the local cultural scene. His work spoke for itself, but it served as the vehicle for his social, political, and cultural commitment. This Invitational Exhibition, which will open 30 December, will be something of a memorial show as well, for the artist died unexpectedly in June of 2002. His wife, Philomena, has cooperated with the Gallery in assembling and preparing the exhibit.

He was born in the town of Durazno, Uruguay, and studied art at the College of Fine Arts of the University of Uruguay in Montevideo. Joaquín Torres-García, the immensely influential artist, teacher, philosopher, and lecturer, had spent his final years in Montevideo, and the continuing influence of the Torres-García Workshop had transformed the city into a major cultural center of Lain America. Throughout his life, Ojeda's work reflected the values and characteristics of the Montevideo aesthetic: (1) a concern for social relevance. (2) an imagery derived from demotic Catholicism, folk art, and the precolumbian [[pre-columbian]] cultures of Latin America, (3) an importance attached to modest materials, and (4) a strong emphasis upon craftsmanship.

Part of the fascination of Ojeda's work derives from the opposites that are balanced within it. Visually, of course, there is the balance of shape and line, of black and white forms, or of colored shapes against the white ground. Beyond the visual elements, one finds simple, stylized figures expressing complex emotions; schematic childlike renderings of sun and moon and trees, but in such variety that no child could have achieved; allusions to daily life combined with medieval or exotic imagery; careful composition incorporating such "accidental" effects as knotholes in the wood, or the woodgrain itself.

One of the largest works in this exhibition, an untitled piece that depicts a red-orange sun above a blue-green bird, might serve as a "signature" print, for it incorporates most of the characteristics listed above. The sun is a circle, with a circle of rays emanating from it; but the circle has a face, impassive, perhaps a bit bored (perhaps even bewildered), and the artist has textured the surface of this