Toto Fernandez Ampuero _ AIR Winter 2025

Expressiones Artist in Residence Winter 2025 - Peruvian Artist

Artist's Statement: The main technique of my work has always been oil painting. In this context, one of my main interests revolves around the formal and traditional concepts of painting, techniques, materials, and surfaces, prioritizing the painter's profession as a vital point for the creation of a piece of art.

 

The topics that interest me are purely urban and contemporary. I focus mainly on individual psychology, creating characters with a pronounced emotional power, capable of generating a connection with the spectator, as well as metaphors of everyday situations. I want my work to be a starting point to begin to discover.

 

I treat individuals, both men and women, as timeless characters immersed in a moment that the work itself suggests.

 

My work covers themes such as sensuality, loneliness, guilt, love, death, the search for identity, routine, among others. Figuration is the predominant in all my work in which images of glamour from past and contemporary decades abound, especially in my female characters, leaving the male characters the role of a troupe that remotely and silently accompanies in some works.

 

I use female representation as a figure of conflict: object of desire. For me, it is an aesthetic ideal of sophistication and glamour, but also an object (and not a subject) elusive to desire. I try to ensure that a “masculine” view of the gender theme, roles and an erotic configuration predominates in this context.

 

My palette used to be sober, refined and restricted in my early works, while at present there is a considerable use of color and multiplicity of tones, influenced by current urban culture, as well as design and media.

 

My taste for global, historical and media values and patterns made the appropriation of images a constant in my early years. Currently, I produce my own photographs, I look for the models, I do the art direction and styling. Photography has become a starting point, but it does not define the totality of my paintings. I look for it to have its own temperature and composition. I let the painting guide me until it is achieved.

 

Although all this has been a process, I have tried to make it something organic and natural. At present, my interests are in large-format painting, always in a figurative way.

 

I have found in collaboration with other artists, experiences that I can draw from, so I can say that interdisciplinary development has allowed me to develop my work in other areas of art that I did not master, such as digital arts or video.