Louis Fratino's paintings, prints, and preparatory pastel drawings are lyrical, very stylised paeans to domestic gay life, reflecting common daily activities and the glories of physical love. However, the work is also rich in allusions to early 20th-century art history, especially early Cubism, despite being overtly figurative and dominated by pairs of amorous naked men, or single men swimming in the sea, reclining on settees, or sleeping.
Read MoreSteeped in knowledge of western art history, Fratino graduated from Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore in 2015. He had benefitted from a fellowship the previous year at Yale Norfolk School of Art, and the following year he went to Berlin through a Fulbright Research Fellowship.
A painter who sees himself as a classical modernist delighting in playfully manipulating the picture plane and formal composition, Louis Fratino is a skilled colourist who focusses on detailed domestic scenes, and also occasional urban vistas or landscapes.
Most of his paintings exemplify the queer gaze, and start with pastel or charcoal drawings, cell phone photographs, or illustrations from art history books or magazines. Tender and delicate, they exude bodily happiness and domestic contentment, packed also with acute observation and art historical references. His painting influences range from Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and Georges Braque to Dana Schulz, Sandro Chia, and Philip Guston.
The Sleepers (2020), with its emphasis on protruding pairs of feet and lower legs, with sheet-covered bodies and heads, is much admired for its humour, tenderness, and exaggerated perspective.
Eggs, Dishes, Coreopsis (2020) shows a sink full of dishes and utensils waiting to be washed. It is unusual because the artist's face is reflected several times in some of the shining metal pans.
Yellow Sleeper (2019) has delicate detail of the man's face, armpits, and torso, delighting in curly chest and arm hair. It is erotic yet quite abstract in its close-up organisation.
Early Spring (2019) shows two men in the midst of sex. It is architectural in its semi-cubist arrangement of limbs, heads, and chests: a choreographed arrangement of almost disconnected muscular body parts, rhythmically orchestrated.
Fratino also enjoys working with printmakers to make copper-plate etchings, where the sensation of direct drawing on the plate is very different from pastel or charcoal on paper. He creates many sorts of printed subject matter, including still lifes such as Anemones and Shells (2021).
Fratino is also an accomplished ceramicist, making a body of 14 terra cotta sculptures in 2019 in Albissola Marina on the Italian Riviera, in Liguria. Featuring pairs of pale umber male figures with no colourful saturated glazes, these projected wall reliefs sometimes included Catholic religious iconography. A good example is Coming Back from the Beach (2019).
Louis Fratino has participated in many solo and group exhibitions.
Solo exhibitions include Morning, Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York (2020); Nudissima, Antoine Levi, Paris (2019); Night and Day, Jeff Bailey Gallery, Hudson (2018); So I've got you, Thierry Goldberg, New York (2017).
Group exhibitions include and I will wear you in my heart of heart, The FLAG Art Foundation, New York (2021); Drawings 2020, Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York (2020); They Gaze, James Fuentes, New York (2019); Matisse + Fratino, Cabinet Printemps, Dusseldorf (2017).
Fratino's work is held in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; Rhode Island School of Design.
John Hurrell | Ocula | 2022
