Mother of Pearl: Michael Lombardo

Lombardo’s practice attends closely to material culture and the visual languages of place. Born and raised in Oklahoma, he moves between these geographies not as fixed identities, but as overlapping systems of memory, belief, and perception. Drawing from personal archives and lived experience, Lombardo paints objects shaped by use and proximity, including flora and fauna, garments, textiles, and keepsakes. Rendered with careful precision, these forms accrue emotional and symbolic weight, held close to the body and marked by touch.

Across the work, references to the American West and Great Plains enter into dialogue with the devotional sensibilities of Panama and his religious upbringing. The recurring conch shell, for instance, appears as both object and sign, at once vernacular and sacred. These natural forms are drawn from Lombardo’s early experiences of Panama, where he spent time as a child, and return throughout the work as carriers of memory. Neither purely symbolic nor strictly personal, the shell holds a shifting position, suspended between recollection and image. Light, texture, and surface become the means through which everyday materials are reoriented, allowing personal history and shared imagery to meet without resolution.

For Mother of Pearl, Lombardo presents a new body of paintings and drawings centred on fabric as both subject and support. Born on December 12, the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, a religious festival that commemorates the Virgin Mary’s miraculous appearance on cloth, this biographical detail quietly underpins the exhibition’s attention to textiles. Here, fabric is not only depicted but activated as a site where image, belief, and memory converge. In several works, Oklahoma’s iron-rich red dirt is embedded directly into the surface by Lombardo, collapsing ground and figure, place and image into a single field.

A suite of small drawings, taken from Lombardo’s sketchbooks and framed with their rounded page edges intact, resists hierarchy and positions drawing as a form of witness, immediate, repetitive, and durational. These are a group of poppy drawings depicts flowers cultivated by the artist in the garden of Ed Ruscha, which he tends. Rendered through fine vertical striations, the blooms begin to blur into the surface of the page, their petals reading as folds or drapery. Observation becomes a form of care, and the poppy, fragile and short-lived, registers time through its gradual emergence and disappearance.

This collapsing of image and material extends into a series of cut-out paintings in which flowers and shells are rendered on shaped supports. Refusing the rectangular frame, these works occupy a space between painting and object. Their edges follow the contours of the subject, allowing the image to assert itself as a physical presence. In these works, the shell reappears not only as a remembered form but as something given weight and edge, its contour defining the limits of the painting itself.

Paintings of pearl-snap cowboy shirts and band T-shirts bearing country and western icons extend this logic of figuration through fabric. Enlarged and rendered with devotional attention, these garments operate as contemporary icons, images worn against the skin, where identity, belief, and longing are held in tension. Elsewhere, a close-cropped view of a zipper and waistband introduces a more intimate register, where clothing becomes a threshold between exposure and concealment.

Across the paintings of silk and satin, Lombardo’s attention turns to surfaces that are inherently unstable, light-responsive, reflective, and difficult to fix. Highlights slide across the painted fabric, producing moments where image and abstraction become indistinguishable. A recurring motif is the satin scarf associated with Panamanian military culture, its sheen and drape rendered with heightened sensitivity. Here, material carries contradictory associations, softness and authority, intimacy and display. The surface does not settle, but flickers between legibility and dissolution.

Across the exhibition, Lombardo situates figuration within the language of abstraction, allowing fabric, creased, folded, and marked by use, to become the ground on which the sacred and the everyday briefly coincide.