Peruvian-born, Washington-based contemporary figurative painter exploring female consciousness through observation, associative symbolism, and physical paint.
Artist Statement
My paintings begin with a face I recognize from the inside. I know the kind of mind behind it: one capable of holding memory, practical thought, pleasure, irritation, longing, ambition, and grief at the same time. Whatever emotion appears most legible on the surface is only one part of her; it is never a sufficient explanation of the woman.
I place myself inside that consciousness and construct the surrounding world from the places, objects, memories, and symbols that belong to it. These elements do not form a fixed allegorical code. Their meanings accumulate through lived association. Domestic reality, coastal memory, history, mythology, and invention coexist because consciousness experiences them simultaneously.
The paint follows the same structure. In faces and bodies, I allow the analytical part of my mind to lead my hand through observation, measurement, and control. In the ridges, drags, interruptions, and accumulated passages I call the “nasties,” I suspend that supervision. Sensation is allowed to become material before it is fully organized or explained. Neither mode is more truthful. Their coexistence records a mind that can be orderly and unruly, lucid and emotionally crowded, often all at once.
I grew up in Tacna, Peru, where Catholicism coexisted—and sometimes collided—with traditional gender expectations, the Inca cosmology and traditions we studied and saw surviving around us, and the economic and social constraints of small-town life. My all-girls Catholic education complicated that inheritance: it also formed my understanding of female possibility, self-sufficiency, and the expectation that I would direct my own life.
Viewers do not need to reconstruct my exact experience. I welcome meanings formed through their own memories and associations. What the work resists is not difference, but reduction: the impulse to collapse a crowded consciousness into one emotion, one role, or one convenient explanation.
About the Artist
Born in Lima, Peru, and raised in Tacna, Fio Lombardi is a contemporary figurative painter based in Browns Point, Washington. Working primarily in oil, she combines observational realism, associative symbolism, and the physical presence of paint.
Her practice is informed by classical painting traditions, the coastal landscapes and layered belief systems of her Peruvian upbringing, and a professional background in technology and systems thinking. She brings discipline, structure, and precision into the studio while allowing memory, sensation, and material experimentation to disrupt the image.
Lombardi is currently developing a body of psychological figurative paintings centered on complex female interiority.
Collector & Exhibition Inquiries
For available works, collector previews, exhibition inquiries, or select commissions, please contact the studio.