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sun, so that it is seen as a shade of the red lines that describe the face and the rays. The bird is a sombre blue-green shape, almost amoeba-like except for the head, with its recognizable beak and eye; and here the artist has inked the block to reveal the grain of the wood, with a knot at its center that might represent an egg within the body of the dove. The work is untitled, but the theme is obviously one of Love: the hard-line geometry of the red-orange sun is complemented by the amorphous blue-green of the dove, whose cool, undulant form tends toward that sun with awareness, but not with submissiveness. This is as nearly perfect as a woodcut can be: a harmony of filled and empty spaces, of warm and cool colors. of line and shape, of flat color and pattern, of accident and control, of organic and geometric--and of personal and universal imagery. 

Ojeda's work has been compared with that of Chagall, in part because of the way the figures sometimes float across his pictures, and surely in part because of the affection and wit that propel them. It is possible, however, that those elements precede any knowledge of Chagall, and have their origins in the culture he knew first: in the milagros--votive offerings--that are omniscient in Latin America, in the work of such folk artists as the wood carvers of Oaxaca, Mexico, or José Antonio Borges in Brazil, and the wood engravings of Posada and others of his generation. The art has deep roots, not merely in Catholic mysticism and Latin-American folk art, but also in the cosmopolitan atmosphere of Montevideo at mid-century. It is an urban, civilized, eclectic art. And it is poetic.

The visual arts in Latin America have always maintained an intimate association with the literary arts. Naúl Ojeda's art stands as something like a visual equivalent of imagist poetry: its juxtapositions are surprising and playful, its compositions lyrical, and its symbolism highly personal. He was an artist uncommonly sensitive to language, and he expressed his love of poetry by turning poems into works of visual art, carving them word by word and verse by verse, adding illustrations and decorative or narrative borders. This is a relief-print version of the poem as calligraphy, and it is superbly suited to Ojeda's technique. The 2004 Invitational includes several examples of his hand-cut poems. They are extraordinary works, beautiful both as literature and as art. The hand-carving of the words results in a pattern that is altogether different from the pattern of printed words on a page, and it slows the reader, allowing a pause for the words and their resonances to take effect. 

A series of woodcuts with titles derived from the Washington subway system (Metro) reveals some of the ways that Ojeda has wrapped the events of daily life into his own work, on the one hand, and into a universal view of the human condition, on the other. Metro Judiciary Square, for instance, depicts a subway car in the lower register--the plane of daily life--with the heads of passengers visible in the windows of the car, chatting, kissing, or ignoring one another; and in the