Louis Fratino would like to get intimate

Louis Fratino’s paintings cover intense and often tender nudes, tables laden with artefacts, tangled limbs and sex, portraits of his mother and still lifes of flowers from his garden in Brooklyn. Aged only 30, the American has already been compared to Picasso, Pierre Bonnard and Lucian Freud. His first small show, With everyone, at Thierry Goldberg in New York in 2016, sold out. Subsequently, institutions have been acquiring: there are two works in the Whitney’s permanent collection, while Red nude (After Mafai), 2023, was recently purchased by the Baltimore Museum of Art. 

Likewise, his work is selling consistently above expectations at auction (he is represented by Sikkema Jenkins in New York). In November 2022, An Argument, 2021, sold at Sotheby’s for $730,800 against estimates of $200,000-$300,000, Earlier this year, Flower Market, 2022, more than doubled predictions at Christie’s, selling for $504,000. He is currently showing a small survey of his work at the Venice Biennale, and this month, his first solo institutional show of more than 50 works, Satura, opens in Tuscany at the Centro Pecci, featuring new paintings alongside sculpture, sketchbooks and lithographs.

“Fratino’s paintings are beautiful and fun and mysterious,” says Virginia Anderson, curator of American Art at Baltimore Museum of Art. “There’s something happening wherever you look, but in a balanced and nuanced way…. His art has a reflective and diaristic quality.” She likens his approach to the writings of Charles Sheeler, Walt Whitman and Virginia Woolf.

“It’s hot as hell,” says Fratino. The artist is sitting in his Brooklyn studio in a plain white T-shirt and wire-frame glasses; his 17-year-old dog Marge sleeps near his desk. Right now he is working on around 15 paintings. “If something isn’t talking back to me, I can just let her have her space and move on to something else and we can start our relationship again when it’s fun and fresh,” he smiles. He talks of his subjects as one might of a partner. “The subject does need to be something you are obsessed with, or can’t get out of your head, or why bother? It’s someone you’re in love with. A memory you can’t shake.” 

His pictures are physical, sculptural: “I love the paintings to be crusty and thick and bodily.” He works from drawings, photographs and memories, taking inspiration from his own daily life – his partner and his family – as well as art history and poetry. He is always surprised, though, when people ask him: “Are you not uncomfortable to be seen in these compromising positions?” His response? “It’s a painting. It’s not me!”

The artist is one of five children – his father worked in construction, his mother for the federal government. His parents “fostered an environment that valued making things with your hands” (his grandmother was a ceramicist). He drew constantly as a child. Growing up in rural Maryland, Fratino visited Washington DC often, where he recalls seeing works by the likes of Leonardo da Vinci. Yet he credits illustrators as his first inspirations. “Like Maurice Sendak [Where the Wild Things Are], who we later learned was a queer artist,” he says. “I think he is incredible.” 

He studied for a BFA in painting with illustration from Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore. His breakthrough “came a bit like a bucket of cold water” when his professors told him that he should explore the unburdened drawing style of his sketchbooks in paint. “It now seems obvious, but in that moment it was like: ‘Oh that would be crazy, these are just doodles.’”

We take a tour of his studio: there’s a frenzied landscape of locust trees he saw in Chelsea last autumn; a nude based on a photo he took in Greenpoint two weekends ago “that happened very quickly”; a “landscape-ish thing” that nods to Turner; a “[Domenico] Gnoli-esque self-portrait” and the beginnings of a subway painting in menacing greys inspired by The Torturers by Edward Burra. “It’s so shocking to me how few people know his work,” he says.  

He stops at a nude he’s “pretty jazzed about”. A naked man is lying on a bed in a room with a green wall; two small artworks are captured within the scene. “I love artworks within artworks,” he says. “Worlds within worlds.”

It transpires this is his own bedroom, the nude inspired by his boyfriend, artist Alessandro Teoldi. “I am attracted to really iconic subject matter that’s almost stupid to try and paint, like a bouquet or a reclining nude or a scene of urban leisure,” he says. “It becomes like a painter’s game. How do you paint something that’s been seen a billion times and can be quite corny, and still make a case for it?” 

Fratino lists My Meal, 2019, as an early example of putting his art history obsessions into his work. “I was thinking about Morandi in the flowers, about Khakar in the camera, and Braque in the newspaper,” he says. “That’s why it’s called My Meal: I think about art history as this buffet you never get too full sampling from. The more you’re referencing, the more disparate those sources are, the richer, stranger and more delicious the thing you’ve created becomes.”

At the moment, Fratino is particularly obsessed with Italian poet Sandro Penna, introduced to him by Stefano Collicelli Cagol, director at Centro Pecci. “I felt like I’d been hit by lightning the first time I read his poems,” says Fratino. “It’s completely unashamed on the themes of homosexual attraction, of looking at men, of being a man, but qualified by incredibly beautiful language – the qualities of light, a still life, or a train going by.” A book of Penna’s poems, Sleepless Traveler, was illustrated by Fratino (lithographs of these will  be shown as part of Satura). 

Collicelli Cagol recognises something similar in Fratino’s studies. “He is capturing things that are strikingly beautiful, but simple in a way,” he says. “They are sometimes the things we miss every day. He is also bringing into the public space, into the institution, a community and showing how they can live, love, be intimate, have sex.” 

“The work is intimate and personal, depicting Louis’s universe of friends and lovers, places familiar and foreign, and all infused with the full spectrum of human experience: joy, tenderness, longing and heartache,” says Pete Scantland, CEO of Orange Barrel Media, who owns several works by Fratino and is lending to the Pecci show. “I find it very relatable because it presents moments from a modern queer life rendered with tenderness,” says another collector, David Williams. “There’s a lot of work out there documenting queer life, but I believe that Fratino does it best.” 

Fratino is pragmatic on the topic of sex and nudity. He acknowledges that when he was younger it probably benefited him, from an art-market perspective, but he does not want his work to become “reduced to a performance of a [queer] identity. I wasn’t interested in that,” he says. “Even if sex and the body are things that I will always want to represent.” Which is not to say that Fratino isn’t also concerned with showing queerness. “The work is queer because I am.”

On the days when he draws from life, it will often be at home. “I don’t really do it in the studio because the set‑up feels corny,” he says. He would rather the situations “feel a bit more like they’ve been chanced upon”. In future, “I’d like to do something that isn’t painting,” he says. “Maybe explore ceramics and drawings more.” Conveniently, he has a kiln in the basement of his apartment block (a 25-minute walk from the studio). He also loves to garden. “Sometimes, I wish I could paint as a hobby and garden full-time,” he grins.