Looking for the light MassArt’s ‘Cuban Prints’ hits the mark; so does ‘¡Dominicanazo!’ at Samson Projects BY CHRISTOPHER MILLIS
	"Cuban Prints" At Massachusetts College of Art’s President’s Gallery, 621 Huntington Avenue in Boston, through March 11. "¡Dominicanazo!: The New Dominican Wave in Art" At Samson Projects, 450 Harrison Avenue in Boston, through February 27.

Tolstoy’s memorable first line to Anna Karenina — "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way" — has its analogue in the world of gallery and museum exhibits. What makes an exhibit terrific is typically hard to pinpoint, as if all greatness were alike, whereas what makes an exhibit flawed is almost always easy to identify. "Cuban Prints" at MassArt — it’s already made its way from the Berkshires via RISD to arrive on Huntington Avenue, and it moves on to Provincetown this spring — belongs to that tough-to-articulate tier of extraordinary shows. Its power lies in the past (when the work was made), the present (the duration of the show), and the future (what the exhibit presages). Its hydraulic force lies in its anticipation of the end of Castro’s Cuba.

Two shadows have loomed over Cuban life in the last half-century: the totalitarianism of Fidel Castro and the imperialism of the United States. Virtually every image, every woodblock, every etching, drawing, photo, and print here confronts those shadows, palpably striving toward the light. The result is a show of amazing clarity, dazzling color, and resolute purpose. It’s also brilliantly calculated. The need to be communicative, to be seen beyond those shadows, proves as imperative as the need to survive. This is a show of arresting visual language that knows it must talk in code.

Struggle may be the overriding theme of "Cuban Prints," yet the flavor of struggle isn’t the kind we’re used to. It isn’t interior, psychological, or anxious; it’s not the struggle of self-scrutiny or doubt; it’s not abstract. In these works, struggle is overt, physical, pitched. Cubans know the forces they’re up against. In one of Yamelis Brito Jorge’s contiguous square woodcuts (each differing scene is acted out against the same identical backdrop, a lacy, turquoise circle that looks like a doily), the middle section of a woman’s body takes the shape of a guillotine. In the next square, a miniature man in the foreground runs with his hands over his ears; looming above him is a tremendous open book with a pistol on one page, a candle on the other, and creatures spilling out. In another segment, the sun rises like a halo behind a statue of the Virgin Mary while the man to her left has his head cleft in two by a crescent moon.

Like the bodies of ice skaters, the images of Jorge’s "La sociedad perfecta" series are both lush and spare. The cumulative effect of the dense colors, the compositional acuity, and the momentous activity of each scene is almost overpowering.

In another of Jorge’s squares, a blue-black silhouette of a man walks along with a lilt to his gait while a single musical note comes out of his mouth, cartoon-style. He’s whistling. Shoulders back, foot raised, the carefree pedestrian is the only image of nonchalance to be seen in Jorge’s expressionistic storybook panels, or anywhere in the exhibit. And surrounding this symbol of relaxation stand five carefully placed and variously sized hurdles. The man with his head in the clouds is about to crash.

For all these figures’ intimations of violence and difficulty and sorrow, Jorge’s work is far from nihilistic. The juxtaposition of images approaches narration and creates a kind of context, and there are always clear relations among the various elements in each tableau. Logic may be strained, but it isn’t dead. By contrast, the fiercely pared-down woodcuts of Hugo Azcuy Castillo, which are also presented as a contiguous grid within a single frame, read like the debris after a plane crash, distillations and emblems of terror and distress. Seemingly electrocuted hands, white or blue, lift up out of nowhere, and in more than one square, the disembodied hands reach toward a knife. A man with a half black face and huge pupil-less eyes, the exposed teeth of his mouth fixed in a snarl, recurs throughout the grid. Three bent pipes representing his body extend from his neck. He is the embodiment of the ferocity of impotence, a trophy on the stake of Vlad the Impaler.

Another recurrent motif of "Cuban Prints" is escape — specifically, escape from Cuba, a subject steeped in its own admixture of turmoil and hope and despair. In Lázaro Saavedra’s screenprint Con la fuerza del ejemplo, the Virgin Mary, in a gold brocade gown and a bishop’s miter, Christ child in hand, occupies a sea-tossed boat with a few men. The men are not fishing. While the waves break above the small vessel and a lightning bolt rips open the sky in the distance, a different weather pattern above is visible to us but out of sight of the occupants. In this Heaven, the sun shines, and a circular opening in the clouds affords a small glimpse into the next world.

Escape and redemption play themselves out somewhat differently in a small (about six inches square), unattributed print immediately to your left as you enter the show. The Madonna levitates above desperately rowing men who fight a similarly threatening sea. One of the crew appears to be praying. And whereas Saavedra’s homage to the boat people reads as purely ingenuous, this work boasts a bar code that also hovers in the air above the sailors, as if to say that even redemption can be scanned and commodified.

Yet another religious seascape, Ricardo Silveira Miro’s Virgen nacional, orchestrates the same imagery into a work of universal power. The tumult of the open seas, the tumult of faith, the air-born Virgin, and the desperate rowing men all occupy Miro’s print, but you can hardly tell any of them apart. The entire surface has been worked over so thoroughly that at first glance it looks abstract, a square of tree bark. The Virgin is almost indistinguishable from the sky, the men almost indistinguishable from the vaulting ocean. And Miro’s Virgin isn’t draped in the garments of the rich or the pious; her skirt is patterned with palm trees, and it’s not clear whether the sailors below are steering a boat or the island of Cuba itself. Even though the work is done in only one color, a rich burnt orange, the effect is radiant.

No less gripping is a series of three woodcuts by Alejandro Ramón Sainz Alfonso that work so well together, I hope the artist will designate them a triptych. In the first, a large, luminous paper airplane sails out from a kitchen window. It’s about to embark on a nighttime trip over the sea. In the middle, we witness a perplexed, troubled man wearing what looks like the same airplane reshaped into a helmet; his clothes and a nearby flag imply he’s in uniform. In the third picture, an old record player’s fluted speaker is positioned by an open window beyond which a formation of paper airplanes sail away. It’s as if music propelled their flight, as if art were the wind on which change took place.

IN LESS THAN A YEAR, Samson Projects has achieved what eludes many galleries over a lifetime: an enthusiastic following, a considerable buzz, and a defined, dynamic mission, — namely, to showcase emerging and established artists who might otherwise go unseen in Boston. It’s a rare thing these days to walk into a commercial gallery and know immediately that the work you’re seeing got there without regard for its ability to "move." Samson Projects belongs to that small group of presenters whose shows are as principled as they are ground-breaking.

In the current exhibit, nine major Dominican artists come together in an exhibit that ranges from playful to tormented, from whimsical to unsettling. By far the subtlest and most unnerving piece in "¡Dominicanazo!" is Tony Capellán’s Dichotomy, a three-dimensional work of baby-bottle nipples arranged on a car windshield. Dichotomy is one of those art works that tricks you into thinking you’ve seen it as soon as you’ve looked at it. It’s made up of 49 nipples altogether; 39 are chocolate brown, the other 10 are translucent, and they’re arranged so the clear ones line up in the center flanked by their darker cousins. Only on close examination do you realize that a tiny hair protrudes from the apertures of some of the nipples, and then on even closer scrutiny you realize that the hair is the tip of a needle. What at first looked haphazard and nondescript becomes premeditated and ominous.

The mixed-media prints of Pascal Meccariello prove less disturbing but no less engaging. In Celula #1 and Celula #2, we get front and back views of the shirtless torso of the artist. We also appear to get a look at his blood vessels and arteries and capillaries, but they aren’t beneath his skin, they’re above it, and they fill up the frame as if he were struggling through a thicket. What’s more, certain schematics have been stamped on his skin — mechanical designs, trees, the head of a sheep. You have the sense of looking through a microscope and discovering a variety show.

Captivating too are the photo transfers on canvas by Iliana Emilia García, who manipulates simple, domestic imagery — family photos, first-aid kits, teddy bears, kitchen clocks, rotary telephones — to create charged, resonant results. Docent Center is made up of 16 identically sized (roughly eight inches square) pictures, one of whose recurrent motifs is the heart. There’s a glass of red candy hearts, an ice-cube tray that makes heart-shaped ice, a heart-shaped hot-water bottle, a tray of silver heart-shaped charms. Interspersed as they are with other domestic artifacts, they give you the feeling they’re following the ups and downs of somebody’s emotional life. It’s unexpectedly, disarmingly poignant. A painting by the renowned José García Cordero, a video installation and body suits by Elia Alba, architecturally influenced work by Belkis Ramírez, and works by Scherezade García, Mónica Ferreras, and Nicolás Dumit Estévez complete the show.