“Take all my loves, my love, yea, take them all” (2023) All images © Fatima Ronquillo, shared with permission
Shrouded with an air of mystery, Fatima Ronquillo’s enchanting oil paintings redefine the long-established style of Europe’s Old Masters. The subjects of her canvases are opulently-adorned, paired with a mélange of Catholic icons, flora, fauna, and magical realism that are bound together by motifs evocative of Colonial-era art. In her forthcoming solo show, Amore: An Ode to Love, Ronquillo accentuates a dream-like world where symbols of history, love, and longing come together.
Based in Santa Fe, the self-taught artist creates her paintings with a deep passion for art history, literature, and opera. Coupled with her lived experiences and the desire to depict worlds of the past, much of Ronquillo’s work seeks to reflect the timelessness of overarching dualities such as man and nature, the old and new, and masculinity and femininity. She tells Colossal:
We are all creatures of the sum of our experiences. I could not paint what I do without exploring the threads of my past and present. My childhood in the Philippines and immigrant experience in the U.S. has naturally given me a lens of seeing images and reading literature from the point of view of someone in between two worlds. Spanish Colonial Art imagery has been a connecting thread from the places I have lived in.
Amore: An Ode to Love opens this week at Dorothy Circus Gallery in Italy. For more updates and artwork, visit the artist’s Instagram and website.
“My love is like to ice, and I to fire” (2023)
“Pink Flag” (2023)
“The Troubadour” (2023)
“The Nightingale and the Rose” (2023)
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