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It is difficult to examine Ojeda's prints without falling back upon the idea of minimalism--yet the effect is anything but minimalist. An untitled piece in the 2004 Invitational has only two shapes, a red-orange sun and a blue-green dove. The sun is a red circle with a circle of red rays emanating from it. The interior of the sun is rendered as a flat tone with a contour-line face that looks impassive--or bored--or perhaps bewildered. The dove is an amoeba-like shape (except for the head, with its recognizable beak and eye) that seems to tend toward the sun with awareness, but not with eagerness or submissiveness. The blue-green shape of the dove is inked to reveal the grain of the wood, with a knot at its center that might suggest an egg within the body of the dove. And this is Ojeda's genius, the indefinable quality of his images: it might or might not be this or that. This work is untitled, but the theme is obviously Love. The hard-line geometry of the red-orange sun is complemented by the amorphous, undulant blue-green of the dove. This woodcut, apparently so simple, is a marvellous harmony of opposites: of filled and empty spaces, of warm and cool color, of line and shape, of flat color and pattern, of accident and control. of organic and geometric--and of personal and universal imagery. All of this occurs within a picture that consists of only two rather simple shapes, in a composition that, like so much of Ojeda's work, bears comparison with Inuit art. One can imagine an ancient Egyptian, a precolumbian Aztec, or a modern Italian looking at this print with very similar understanding.

Metro Judiciary Square, while not quite so free from the shackles of time as other works, reveals some of the ways that Ojeda has wrapped the events of daily life into both his own work and into a universal view of the human condition. It is one of a series on the theme of the Washington subway system (Metro). It 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; they ignore one another, or chat, or kiss, or read the newspaper; and in the foreground we see the heads of people waiting on the station platform. In the upper register, taking a cue from the name of the station, is a folk-medieval rendition of The Last Judgment: a hieratic Christ flanked by groups of the saved and the damned. Red and green devils hover over the damned, while the sun smiles over the saved (and, cleverly, over the Washington Monument and the towers of the National Cathedral). It is worth noting that Ojeda has used a liner--a tool that cuts several fine parallel lines at once--to create the toned surface of the subway car, and a crosscut knot of wood to represent the belly of Christ. In another print from the series, Metro Zoo, he has used the surface of a rough-sawn board to depict with stunning effect the pelt of the human-faced animal that dominates the picture. 

Another important influence upon Naúl Ojeda's woodcuts was poetry. It is not unusual for visual artists to be sensitive to poetry, but in Ojeda's case the influence was of particular importance, perhaps because he grew up--as every educated