New York painter Louis Fratino
Louis Fratino’s paintings capture the everyday in all its glory
For an artist who says he likes to explore “the clutter of daily life”, you’d be right to think that the lockdown period has suited 27-year-old Louis Fratino rather well. “It’s funny that before all this started, I was starting to paint still lives, making a lot of images of objects and my interior spaces,” he says from his sunny apartment in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. “Now it will be interpreted that I’ve just been spending all my time at home. Which is true, to a degree,” he laughs, “but also kind of a coincidence.”
Fratino is one of the most exciting painters to have emerged of late, though it wasn’t paintings of sourdough that first caught the art world’s attention. (And anyway, he’s avoided painting any lockdown clichés: “When you’re someone who abstracts things, stylises things, you don’t have a lot to work with when it’s a banana bread or a lasagne.”) Rather it was his vibrant paintings of himself, friends, family, lovers real and “composite”, in moments of repose, sexual intimacy, or just going about their lives: eating dinner, having a haircut, walking the dog. His faces have large eyes and direct gazes; his limbs are solid but soft; his figures fill the corners of their canvases, yet even at their most contorted they convey gentleness and tactility.
His deft technique with oil paints and pastels, which he favours for their “long history and organic quality”, has earned him comparisons with Picasso and Chagall, but it is the striking tenderness of his figurative work that has put him, according to The New York Review of Books, “at the forefront of a new queer painting that restages the rites of masculinity, privileging moments of quiet camaraderie”.
For Fratino, who has dark brown hair and eyes, and an easy, thoughtful manner, this is a welcome though uncalculated effect: “I feel like whether or not we want it to be, our work is always indicative of who we are as people. I think I just prefer that feeling to other feelings, you know? I want familiarity and warmth, and that’s why I focus on it.”
One of the other pervading themes of Fratino’s work is memory; which means, of course, its shortcomings. He often chooses not to paint from life, or from photographs, but from his imagination. “I think it’s easier to treat the body a little bit less formally when you’re working from memory,” he says. “It’s like, ‘It’s cool if a leg does that…’ but when you’re looking at it, you’re like, ‘Whoa! It really doesn’t work like that, actually.’ I feel myself becoming less inventive when I’m drawing from observation. It also means the content of my work is not so diaristic as I feel like people want it to be. It becomes fantasy, and also fiction, because memory just fails so much.”
Born and raised in Maryland, it was at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore that Fratino began to understand his own language as a painter, thanks to a gentle steer from one of his tutors there, the South African artist Jo Smail. “She was the first to look seriously at the things I was doing that I wasn’t showing to people, or wasn’t thinking were real artworks — drawings I would do when I was on the phone, or would consider as shorthand for bigger ideas — and she helped me realise that you have to be a little bit embarrassed about what you’re doing. Otherwise you’re putting on a show.”
After a year spent in Berlin on a Fulbright scholarship, he moved to New York in 2016, commuting an hour-and-a-half each way from Staten Island to work on the ticket desk of the Guggenheim (“I could make drawings on receipt paper at the information desk, where people don’t go so often”). But his work was already attracting attention: in his first month in the city he landed a solo exhibition at a gallery on the Lower East Side, and a subsequent write-up in The New York Times that praised his “jewel-like oil paintings” and “extensive vocabulary of enlivening, lapidarian brushwork”. He was just turning 23. “I don’t think I appreciated how bizarre and incredibly lucky that was,” he says, “but that’s sort of what kicked things off.”
His recent still life works have helped him
deepen his understanding of his medium. “I’m excited by the fact that the act of painting charges the objects in my life with a symbolic quality they might not otherwise have,” he says. “I remember the first time I painted the Fruit of the Loom brand logo on underwear. I was like, ‘This is so interesting: there’s a still life on a pair of underwear! It’s not just a corporate logo: it’s a cornucopia of fruit. It makes life more rich to think about it that way. I like that painting has that kind of transformative power.”
Recently, Fratino has found himself looking at the work of Filippo de Pisis and Marsden Hartley, gay artists working in the first half of the 20th century who often painted still lives. “As a child raised in the straight community, you’re fed these images of queer people that are so ‘othering’ and feel like they belong to such a separate world. Then you realise, ‘Oh my god, gay people also can get a cold! They probably also eat canned food sometimes!’ I’m thinking about how, because I make [these still lives], because I live my life, it makes them queer images. I don’t really have to be compensating for that, or illustrating queerness to a broader audience by more obvious means.”
With a show to prepare for at Sikkema Jenkins & Co gallery in New York in October, and another at the Des Moines Art Center planned for late 2021, Fratino’s lockdown is proving a busy one, prompting regular bicycle commutes to the studio in nearby Bushwick that he shares with his boyfriend, Tom (“I still don’t go on the weekends. Not usually. Maybe Sundays”). It has also given him time to reflect on what he wants all of his art to convey.
“I make work about my own relationship with painting: I want to see what makes me love painting, what I love about painting,” he says. “And I want people to feel, even if it’s not 100 per cent true, that I had fun when I was making it.”
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