Strange Fruit: Vicente Albán’s Quito Series And Local Ways Of Seeing In The Era Of Colonial Enlightenment

Résumé 0

Vicente Albán’s 1783 series provides a glimpse into the late colonial world of Quito at a moment when the environment was becoming an increasing source of interest. In accordance with the “enlightened” Bourbon reforms, administrators sought to approach the natural world in Spain’s colonies as a possible source of wealth. He became deeply involved in these enlightenment projects, executing thousands of botanical illustrations for scientific study. I will examine these paintings as a response to the exploration impetus as well as in terms of their local production. I will discuss the ways in which the universalizing tendencies of the Bourbon reforms and Enlightenment sciences responded to and interpenetrated local forms of knowledge and ways of seeing and how local visual culture, in turn, infused the empirical aesthetic of scientific knowledge with a distinctly local artistic syntax. By investigating these paintings as both products of the baroque aesthetic and the descriptive tendencies of the enlightenment era, I will demonstrate how these series can be understood as an effort to simultaneously entice foreign audiences and investors while also allowing the artist to reimagine his environment. Albán’s series sheds light on our understanding of the Enlightenment in its visual manifestations. The inventive responses to requests for codified knowledge gave way to a kind of artistic activity no longer bound by the religious guild system. Free to make recourse to nostalgic themes, Albán, I argue, painted his homeland in a manner that both pays homage to the artistic legacy of the highland center while evoking a sort of pride that a foreign viewer may have missed. Understood as a site of competing prerogatives and aesthetics, Albán’s series conveys a more nuanced understanding of eighteenth century visual culture as a negotiation of visual and epistemological systems.