A review of Harmonia Rosales: Master Narrative
By: Jaedon Mason
Harmonia Rosales’ Master Narrative is on display at the Spellman College of Fine Art till December 2, 2023.
In the exhibition, Rosales presents the Yoruba Orishas (West African Gods) in renaissance style in a way that is seductively simple. This premise, taken on its own, sort of gives A.I. art and screams for a click bait-y review with a play-on-words title something like, “Black Vatican in Black Mecca”. But I think viewing the exhibition through these lenses is more than a little reductive, and instead want to take some time to go over how the premise plays out and why it works so well to make explicit some of its more heady themes.
Rosales’ success in Master Narrative centers around the way she is able to take a niche set of characters and stories and make them feel deeply familiar.
This is achieved throughout the exhibition in this excellent interplay between Renaissance aesthetics and Rosales’ modern personal craftsmanship. Rosales is able to use textbook Renaissance linearity in composition to give the viewer a place to orient themself among unfamiliar figures. For a majority of American viewers, the Yoruba Orishas are strangers but Rosales' depicts them in clear, flat scenes that invite themselves to be viewed and considered, to have their intricacies examined. Direct nods to more “Classically Western” composition add familiarity without requiring the viewer to recognize every reference being made in order to appreciate the images.
In this approach, of paying direct stylistic nods to a kind of universally familiar, but untouchably important era, she’s able to harness the existing mental strata we have about this era and attach it onto the new, now only relatively unfamiliar subjects. The exhibition implicitly brings concepts of divinity and the idealization of the human form, front of mind before complicating them with a new perspective.
This broad macro-level stylistic approach is paired with robust naturalistic technique exemplified in the way crucial details are captured. The exquisite detail of the water, the facial expressions, the different forms of the bodies and the blues, greens, and oranges in the tones of their skin serve to heighten the way each piece is able to enthrall and also serves, again, to make the images more familiar.
In a lot of ways, renaissance art has always been very foreign to me. I can get why things are important once they are explained but there is still a certain sterility to them. Plainly, I just don’t get what Michelangelo was trying to “do”, making people so lumpy or why Jesus always looks so bored.
But these are the kinds of things Rosales has left behind, the limitations she has surpassed in her works. It’s the relatability of the way she captures the human-like figures particularly that allows for these images to assert themselves as fundamentally contemporary. Rosales reinterprets what is the divine human form, translates it as holy, while keeping it able to be not just understood but related to, by any one walking down the street. The “people” depicted are strangers, but you can implicitly understand them, in a testament to the artist's craft.
The symphony of these aesthetic choices make you forget that you didn’t know the Orisha Yemaya, Orisha of the sea/water, walking into the exhibition. For Rosales, Yemaya is center stage, pictured directly throughout the exhibition, but also seen in water itself being a major element in several images. I took this to not only emphasize the goddess’ centrality to all living things but also in the beach, Rosales has found an effective symbol of Yemaya’s role as a goddess of constants and change, as well as of transition and the squishy interplay between these things. Her maternal form is exquisitely captured and held up as the ideal, but stays relatable. A particular highlight was her expression in Garden of Eve, where Rosales perfectly captures the subtleties in the exasperated, but proud mother’s face.
It’s how these aesthetic choices reinforce each other, creating a path for any viewer to source personal meaning from images that should be unfamiliar, which to me, echoed the larger meditation of the exhibition.
Rosales in this exhibition seeks to make “the divine” touchable. There are layers to this point but throughout Rosales takes things that are placed on “the high shelf” that are “not to be touched” and plays with them allowing the viewer to play with them also.
Yemaya as an example, for me moving throughout the exhibition, was ensconced by Rosales as the Goddess of the Diaspora and this is sort of the point. The exhibition asserts the fact that “the sacred” is not some discreet, innate quality of a thing. We create it together when we decide to put things “on the high shelf”, but things left on the “high shelf” that aren’t a part of how we live, collect dust and are forgotten. Rosales responds to this by inviting us to share in the maintenance, proliferation and celebration of the stories that make up the Lucumí faith, taking it further by contemplating the idea that the things we have put on the “high shelf” in the past we sometimes designate as above scrutiny. In a display of tremendous vulnerability, by directly comparing herself to these “High shelf masters” Rosales almost calls for scrutiny in a way that also directs us on a path to scrutinize and discuss the other people and things that have long been on this “high shelf” out of reach, and in doing so breathes a new life into the discourse.
That being said, I did have one rather substantive critique. I felt that “Still We Rise” was incredibly poorly lit. Because of the harshness of the light, only a portion of the piece is visible at a time from any one angle, with most of the detail in the rest being washed out by the light. Maybe this was intentional, but the piece is given its own, smaller viewing space, that almost certainly will be shared with others. This puts moving around in order to actually see the piece and worrying about blocking other’s view front of mind in a way that distracts from the work itself. It was incredibly disappointing from what was supposed to be one of the climactic moments of the exhibition.
But this was just about the only low point. There were so many moments of truly jaw dropping technique, but overall I was struck by the contemplativeness of the exhibition.
Being a black person aspiring to work in “contemporary fine art” is weird. It’s not necessarily a separate pursuit but it can feel like, any moment your not rigorously studying and working to uplift recently discovered works from the early dynasties of the Western Sahel, you’re simply yet another naively complicit in “Sending whitey to the moon”.
But there is a larger truth that becomes hard and complicated to remember (to say nothing of to practice) given the ingrained, heinous state of our institutions. That we are all actually one people, of one larger, messy, kaleidoscopic, ultimately beautiful heritage, that is all of ours by birthright. It is this truth that Rosales meditates on and reflects intricately in Master Narrative.
It’s a disservice to these works to suggest they are merely “Renaissance Images with black subjects”. What Rosales is doing is asserting the place of her perspective, the place of her and her gods' among our histories and within our pantheons. Thumbing her nose at the great “masters” of the past while asserting her right to be included among their number by merit through sheer force of effectiveness.
In Master Narrative, Rosales uses Renaissance aesthetics, with their characteristic simplicity, fascination with divinity and the human form, elevated by a masterful selective naturalism to make scenes and characters that are foreign to most, seem familiar in a way that is welcoming and deeply resonant. In the exhibition, you are able to meet characters and see them recur, having their narratives fleshed out to the point where you leave a fellow believer, with Ogun and his machete clearing your path forward.
