Research Focus Group Talk: The Fall and the Fallen: The Lateness of Harmonia Rosales’ Adam and Eve

This talk seeks to complicate the linguistic operations of conceptualism, an aesthetic movement which often privileges the word, by exploring the relationship between form (forma and schema) and perception (opticus and perspectiva) within Harmonia Rosales’ Dinis Dias: Land of the Negros (2022) and Strangler Fig: Adam and Eve (2022). Rosales uses the medium of oil and canvas/wood as a way to reorient the Renaissance concept of disegno—understood as a form that precedes the actuality of an image on a surface—as an a priori apperception. That is, Rosales consumes, regurgitates, and pro-jects (Ent-werfen) the presupposed disegno within the two interrelated genres of devotional images (The Fall and Last Judgement). When considered alongside images from the sixteenth- and seventeenth-centuries—like Hans Memling’s Adam and Eve (1485-90), Albrecht Dürer’s Adam and Eve (c. 1504 and c.1507), Michael Coxie’s The Fall of Man (c.1550), and Jacob Jordaen’s Last Judgement (c.1653)—the formal and optical disruptions of Rosales’ work become even more pronounced. Ultimately, the paper proposes that neo-Aristotelian explorations of body and space within both humanism and scholasticism are essential for understanding how Rosales figures blackness as temporally and spatially plural. Dinis Dias: Land of the Negros and Strangler Fig: Adam and Eve are pro-jections (Entwurf) which reinterpret how observers see blackness as a temporally discrete apperception of unified categories; as such, the formal medium and the forms induced within the medium disrupt a definite extension and local definition of black bodies within space.

Dontay M. Givens II is a medieval and early modern studies and Black studies PhD student in the English Department at New York University. His research interests include the aesthetic constructions of blackness with the premodern global context from 1300 to 1700; the global movements of blackness as an aesthetic concept within the Spanish Low Countries and the Dutch and French Empires; and the history of capitalism, black feminisms, the conception of the human, critiques of black representations, and medieval romance literature.

Please contact vagt@ucsb.edu to receive the pre-circulated readings for this talk.

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Sponsored by the IHC’s Environmental and Postcolonial Media Theories Research Focus Group