American Art Collector, April 2013
The Collector Says... "The paintings of Fatima Ronquillo caught my eye as I was perusing the website of Wally Workman Gallery several years ago. I was completely taken by what I discovered. The classic portraits executed with such a refined hand spoke to my love of early American portraits. Drawn in by the beautiful jewel tones, I was reminded of Mexican and Spanish colonial art... The intrigue of Fatima's work is that even in its serious form there is always a sense of wonder, of magic; a slight quirk, if you will." ―Ann Williams, Fredericksburg, Texas
April 18, 2013
15 Bytes, March 2012
Fatima imagines a romance, replete with traditional symbols: arrows, bleeding wounds, hand-written notes, and in two recent series, ornaments depicting the Eye of the Beloved and, conversely, blindfolds. Most Fatima Ronquillos are small: tiny, even. At the gallery, Susan Meyer often sets them on a table or desk, the way Isabella Stewart Gardner kept her Vermeer....
April 28, 2012
Aether Magazine, Fall/Winter 2011
Immediately engaging, the work of Fatima Ronquillo reminds us of another time, one that may or may not exist. Painted in a similar manner to that of the European masters and using much of the same language as Early American Colonial art and Latin American art, each piece feels like a secret world revealed. Her symbolism is the only clue as to what lies beyond....
October 14, 2011
American Arts Quarterly, Spring 2011
Ronquillo is a self-taught artist, who filters classic European portrait conventions through her own imagination. The resulting works have an apparent naiveté that lightly veils the formal eloquence of her compositions. Like the best Latin American artists of the colonial era, she translates elements of the European grand style into her own more modest yet pictorially vibrant idiom....
July 18, 2011
Pasatiempo, October 2010
The paintings of Fatima Ronquillo... blend past and present, young and old in beguiling works that may invite the viewer to imagine narratives for them. Most of her portraits are filled with symbolic gestures. Some contain odd, often humorous pairings of humans and animals, and they are all painted against pastoral backgrounds that evoke different periods of historic painting traditions....
October 23, 2010
