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foreground, the heads of people waiting on the platform. In the upper register, taking a cue from the name of the Metro station, we see a folk-medieval rendition of The Last Judgment, a hieratic Christ flanked by groups of the saved and the damned, with red and green devils hovering over the damned, while the sun smiles over the saved (and amusingly, over the Washington Monument and the towers of the National Cathedral). Of technical note, Ojeda in this woodcut had used a liner to create a toned area for the subway car's surface, and a crosscut knot of wood to represent the belly of Christ; in another print of the series, Metro Zoo, he has used the rough surface of a swan board to depict with stunning effect the pelt of the human-face animal that dominates the picture.

Another group in the Washington Printmakers Gallery show is related to Ojeda's work of the last years of his life, when he turned from woodcut to painting. This is a set of prints that employ color without the typical unifying element of black. They are linocuts, produced in the mid-1980's; they must have arisen out of a painterly impulse, for they exhibit an interest in color for its own sake that is not common in Ojeda's woodcuts. In addition, these prints show a concern for surface, with three or four or five different textures employed within a single print, with colors modified through overlapping; and because of the absence of black, the direction of strokes assumes an importance that is present, but hardly noticed, in the woodcuts.

At the other extreme are prints that employ black only, and these comprise another group in the 2004 Invitational Show. In these woodcuts, texture (and tone derived from texture) substitutes for color, so that the surface of the print is rich with shape and pattern. One of the most charming of these, Painting with Words, grew out of Ojeda's frustration with having to learn English: its subject is a disgruntled man seated at a round table covered with letters that spill off the tabletop. Above all this is the image of a woman, her hair curling in a great cloud over the entire scene--the object, one senses, of his (and our) need to communicate with words. 

By far the largest group of prints in the Washington show is that of truly representative works. What makes them representative is their exquisite balance of compositional elements; the use of large, simple silhouette-like shapes; the striking colors set against black (or, occasionally, complementary) areas; the incorporation of the surface of the wood (or, sometimes, a found object) into the composition; an enthusiastic and inventive use of (for lack of a better word) cliché; and not least, the intimation of a narrative that lies just beyond our grasp. Wings of a Dove incorporates all of these qualities: the dove flies into the highest register of the print, and a woman reaches up toward the bird from below. To the left is a large, round, orange sun (beautifully linked to display the grain of the wood, and