Looking for the light MassArt’s ‘Cuban Prints’ hits the mark; so does ‘¡Dominicanzo!’ 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.