Michael Alejandro Rowan de la Rosa (B. 1994) is a Venezuelan-American Artist, based near Aspen, Colorado working as a curator and arts writer. He is a Hunter College BFA graduate (2020) and a Kent State MFA Graduate (2023).

ARTIST STATEMENT

My paintings are about bodies straining under the weight of inherited myths — systems that structure perception and authority.

The medieval past serves as a stage and test for heroic motivations. The figures in my paintings occupy unstable roles: blind kings, newborn snake gods, and ambitious heroes whose mandates exceed their capabilities. Their bodies and environments distort, visually negotiating between the fantasy of an ideal and its ensuing material tragedies. Rather than illustrating myth as narrative, the paintings operate as systems where authority is embodied in form and perception is put under pressure by belief. Roles are staged, as heroes, saints, and martyrs become immersed in their own emerging authority and violence.

While my background as a Venezuelan political exile informs the tone of the work, it does not dictate its imagery. Once I have a composition, I withdraw from physical and academic references to focus on the material conditions of painting. I build surfaces through a rough accumulation of marks, correction and erasure allowing forms to emerge through revision. In this process, painting simulates belief states through material instability, as scratching, sanding, and staining the canvas produces images that oscillate between construction and collapse.

Instead of a heroic resolution, I am compelled by the vulnerability and instability that guides the work toward something immediate, small, and personal. The paintings are less about mapping conviction than exposing how conviction takes hold in the image itself, and how it begins to unravel under its own conditions of perception.